The life of reason; or, The phases of human progress

THE LIFE OF REASON

THE LIFE OF REASON : or the
Phases of Human Progress

By GEORGE SANTA YANA

Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Harvard
University

I. INTRODUCTION AND REA
SON IN COMMON SENSE.

II. REASON IN SOCIETY.

III. REASON IN RELIGION.

IV. REASON IN ART.

V. REASON IN SCIENCE.

THE LIFE OF REASON

OR THE

PHASES OF HUMAN PROGRESS

BY
GEORGE SANTAYANA

INTRODUCTION

AND

REASON IN COMMON SENSE

17 yap vov evepycta 0)77

LONDON

ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO. Ltd.
1906

B

Copyright, 1905, by Charles Scribner s Sons, for th
United States of America

Printed by the Trow Directory, Printing and Bookbinding Company
New York, U. S. A.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTE
CEDENTS

Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.
Efficacious reflection is reason. The Life of Reason a
name for all practical thought and all action justified
by its fruits in consciousness. It is the sum of Art. It
has a natural basis which makes it definable. Modern
philosophy not helpful. Positivism no positive ideal.
Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and
conditions. Liberal theology a superstitious attitude
toward a natural world. The Greeks thought straight
in both physics and morals. Heraclitus and the imme
diate. Democritus and the naturally intelligible.
Socrates and the autonomy of mind. Plato gave the
ideal its full expression. Aristotle supplied its natural
basis. Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of re
statement. Plato s myths in lieu of physics. Aristotle s
final causes. Modern science can avoid such expedi
ents. Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.
Verbal ethics. Spinoza and the Life of Reason. Mod
ern and classic sources of inspiration Pages 1-32

REASON IN COMMON SENSE
CHAPTER I

THE BIRTH OF REASON

Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when
incompatible with a chosen good. Absolute order, or
truth, is static, impotent, indifferent. In experience
order is relative to interests which determine the moral

V

VJ CONTENTS

status of all powers. The discovered conditions of reason
not its beginning. The flux first. Life the fixation of
interests. Primary dualities. First gropings. Instinct
the nucleus of reason. Better and worse the fundamental
categories Pages 35-47

CHAPTER II

FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS

Dreams before thoughts. The mind vegetates uncon
trolled save by physical forces. Internal order super
venes. Intrinsic pleasure in existence. Pleasure a good,
but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an
object. Subhuman delights. Animal living. Causes at
last discerned. Attention guided by bodily impulse.

Pages 48-63

CHAPTER III

THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS

Nature man s home. Difficulties in conceiving nature.
Transcendental qualms. Thought an aspect of life and
transitive. Perception cumulative and synthetic. No
identical agent needed. Example of the sun. His prim
itive divinity. Causes and essences contrasted. Voracity
of intellect. Can the transcendent be known? Can the
immediate be meant? Is thought a bridge from sensa
tion to sensation? Mens naturaliter platonica. Identity
and independence predicated of things Pages 64-83

CHAPTER IV

ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY

Psychology as a solvent. Misconceived role of intel
ligence. All criticism dogmatic. A choice of hypoth
eses. Critics disguised enthusiasts. Hume s gratuitous
scepticism. Kant s substitute for knowledge. False sub
jectivity attributed to reason. Chimerical reconstruc
tion. The Critique a work on mental architecture.
Incoherences. Nature the true system of conditions.

CONTENTS vii

Artificial pathos in subjectivism. Berkeley s algebra of
perception. Horror of physics. Puerility in morals.
Truism and sophism. Reality is the practical made
intelligible. Vain "realities" and trustworthy "fic
tions" Pages 84-117

CHAPTER V

NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED

Man s feeble grasp of nature. Its unity ideal and
discoverable only by steady thought. Mind the erratic
residue of existence. Ghostly character of mind. Hypos-
tasis and criticism both need control. Comparative con
stancy in objects and in ideas. Spirit and sense defined
by their relation to nature. Vague notions of nature in
volve vague notions of spirit. Sense and spirit the life of
nature, which science redistributes but does not deny.

Pages 118-136

CHAPTER VI

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS

Another background for current experience may be
found in alien minds. Two usual accounts of this con
ception criticised: analogy between bodies, and dramatic
dialogue in the soul. Subject and object empirical, not
transcendental, terms. Objects originally soaked in sec
ondary and tertiary qualities. Tertiary qualities trans
posed. Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities
of perceived body "Pathetic fallacy" normal, yet
ordinarily fallacious. Case where it is not a fallacy.
Knowledge succeeds only by accident. Limits of insight.
Perception of character. Conduct divined, conscious
ness ignored. Consciousness untrustworthy. Metaphor
ical mind. Summary Pages 137-160

CHAPTER VII

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE

So-called abstract qualities primary. General quali
ties prior to particular things. Universals are concretions
in discourse. Similar reactions, merged in one habit of
reproduction, yield an idea. Ideas are ideal. So-called

viii CONTENTS

abstractions complete facts. Things concretions of con
cretions. Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things
in the order of nature. Aristotle s compromise. Empiri
cal bias in favour of contiguity. Artificial divorce of logic
from practice. Their mutual involution. Rationalistic
suicide. Complementary character of essence and exist
ence Pages 161-183

CHAPTER VIII

ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS

Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical
principle. Concretions in discourse express instinctive re
actions. Idealism rudimentary. Naturalism sad. The
soul akin to the eternal and ideal. Her inexperience.
Platonism spontaneous. Its essential fidelity to the
ideal. Equal rights of empiricism. Logic dependent on
fact for its importance, and for its subsistence.
Reason and docility. Applicable thought and clarified
experience Pages 184-204

CHAPTER IX

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL

Functional relations of mind and body. They form one
natural life. Artifices involved in separating them. Con
sciousness expresses vital equilibrium and docility. Its
worthlessness as a cause and value as an expression.
Thought s march automatic and thereby implicated in
events. Contemplative essence of action. Mechanical
efficacy alien to thought s essence. Consciousness trans
cendental and transcendent. It is the seat of value,
Apparent utility of pain. Its real impotence. Pre-
formations involved. Its untoward significance. Perfect
function not unconscious. Inchoate ethics. Thought
the entelechy of being. Its exuberance. . . . Pages 205-235

CHAPTER X

THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION

Honesty in hedonism. Necessary qualifications. The
will must judge. Injustice inherent in representation.
^Esthetic and speculative cruelty. Imputed values : their

CONTENTS

inconstancy. Methods of control. Example of fame.
Disproportionate interest in the aesthetic. Irrational
religious allegiance. Pathetic idealisations. Inevitable
impulsiveness in prophecy. The test a controlled present
ideal ................................. Pages 236-255

CHAPTER XI

SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL

The ultimate end a resultant. Demands the substance
of ideals. Discipline of the will. Demands made prac
tical and consistent. The ideal natural. Need of unity
and finality. Ideals of nothing. Darwin on moral sense.

Conscience and reason compared. Reason imposes no
new sacrifice. Natural goods attainable and compatible
in principle. Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand
of reason .............................. Pages 256-268

CHAPTER XII

FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE

Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed.
Contrary currents of opinion. Pantheism. Instability
in existences does not dethrone their ideals. Absolutist
philosophy human and halting. All science a deliverance
of momentary thought. All criticism likewise. Origins
inessential. Ideals functional. They are transferable to
similar beings. Authority internal. Reason autonomous.

Its distribution. Natural selection of minds. Living
stability. Continuity necessary to progress. Limits of
variation. Spirit a heritage. Perfectibility. Nature and
human nature. Human nature formulated. Its concrete
description reserved for the sequel ....... Pages 269-291

INTRODUCTION

THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS
METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS

Progress is Whatever forces may govern human
relative to an iif e ^ if they are to be recognised by
reflection man, must betray themselves in human
creates. experience. Progress in science or re

ligion, no less than in morals and art, is a dra
matic episode in man s career, a welcome variation
in his habit and state of mind ; although this vari
ation may often regard or propitiate things exter
nal, adjustment to which may be important for
his welfare. The importance of these external
things, as well as their existence, he can estab
lish only by the function and utility which a rec
ognition of them may have in his life. The en
tire history of progress is a moral drama, a tale
man might unfold in a great autobiography, could
his myriad heads and countless scintillas of con
sciousness conspire, like the seventy Alexandrian
sages, in a single version of the truth committed
to each for interpretation. What themes would
prevail in such an examination of heart? In
what order and with what emphasis would they
be recounted? In which of its adventures would
VOL. L 1 1

2 THE LIFE OF EEASON

the human race, reviewing its whole experience,
acknowledge a progress and a gain? To answer
these questions, as they may be answered specu-
latively and provisionally by an individual, is the
purpose of the following work.
__ A philosopher could hardly have a

Efficacious

reflection is higher ambition than to make himself
reason. & mouth-piece for the memory and

judgment of his race. Yet the most casual con
sideration of affairs already involves an attempt
to do the same thing. Keflection is pregnant from
the beginning with all the principles of synthesis
and valuation needed in the most comprehensive
criticism. So soon as man ceases to be wholly
immersed in sense, he looks before and after, he
regrets and desires; and the moments in which
prospect or retrospect takes place constitute the
reflective or representative part of his life, in con
trast to the unmitigated flux of sensations in
which nothing ulterior is regarded. Eepresenta-
tion, however, can hardly remain idle and merely
speculative. To the ideal function of envisaging
the absent, memory and reflection will add (since
they exist and constitute a new complication in
being) the practical function of modifying the
^future. Vital impulse, however, when it is modi
fied by reflection and veers in sympathy with judg
ments pronounced on the past, is properly called
reason. Man s rational life consists in those mo
ments in which reflection not only occurs but
proves efficacious. What is absent then works in

INTRODUCTION 3

the present, and values are imputed where they
cannot be felt. Such representation is so far from
being merely speculative that its presence alone
can raise bodily change to the dignity of action.
Reflection gathers experiences together and per
ceives their relative worth; which is as much as
to say that it expresses a new attitude of will in
the presence of a world better understood and
turned to some purpose. The limits of reflection
mark those of concerted and rational action; they
circumscribe the field of cumulative experience,
or, what is the same thing, of profitable living.
T . T ., Thus if we use the word life in a

Ine Life of

Reason a eulogistic sense to designate the happy
practical" *" maintenance against the world of some
thought and definite ideal interest, we may say with
^tifiedby Aristotle that life is reason in opera-
its fruits in tion. The Life of Reason will then y
consciousness. ^ Q & name f or ft^ p ar O f experience

which perceives and pursues ideals all conduct
so controlled and all sense so interpreted as to
perfect natural happiness.

Without reason, as without memory, there might
still be pleasures and pains in existence. To
increase those pleasures and reduce those pains
would be to introduce an improvement into the
sentient world, as if a devil suddenly died in hell
or in heaven a new angel were created. Since
the beings, however, in which these values would
reside, would, by hypothesis, know nothing of one
another, and since the betterment would take place

4 THE LIFE OF KEASON

unprayed-for and unnoticed, it could hardly be
called a progress; and certainly not a progress in
man, since man, without the ideal continuity given
by memory and reason, would have no moral being.
In human progress, therefore, reason is not a
casual instrument, having its sole value in its ser
vice to sense; such a betterment in sentience
would not be progress unless it were a progress in
reason, and the increasing pleasure revealed some
object that could please; for without a picture of
the situation from which a heightened vitality
might flow, the improvement could be neither re
membered nor measured nor desired. The Life
of Reason is accordingly neither a mere means nor
a mere incident in human progress ; it is the total
and embodied progress itself, in which the pleas
ures of sense are included in so far as they can
be intelligently enjoyed and pursued. To recount
man s rational moments would be to take an in
ventory of all his goods; for he is not himself (as
we say with unconscious accuracy) in the others.
If he ever appropriates them in recollection or
prophecy, it is only on the ground of some physi
cal relation which they may have to his being.

Reason is as old as man and as prevalent as
human nature; for we should not recognise an
animal to be human unless his instincts were to
some degree conscious of their ends and rendered
his ideas in that measure relevant to conduct.
Many sensations, or even a whole world of dreams,
do not amount to intelligence until the images in

INTRODUCTION 5

the mind begin to represent in some way, how
ever symbolic, the forces and realities confronted
in action. There may well be intense conscious
ness in the total absence of rationality. Such
consciousness is suggested in dreams, in madness,
and may be found, for all we know, in the depths
of universal nature. Minds peopled only by
desultory visions and lusts would not have the dig
nity of human souls even if they seemed to pur
sue certain objects unerringly; for that pursuit
would not be illumined by any vision of its goal.
Eeason and humanity begin with the union of
instinct and ideation, when instinct becomes en-
.lightened, establishes values in its objects, and is
turned from a process into an art, while at the
same time consciousness becomes practical and
cognitive, beginning to contain some symbol or
record of the co-ordinate realities among which it
arises.

Eeason accordingly requires the fusion of two
types of life, commonly led in the world in well-
nigh total separation, one a life of impulse ex
pressed in affairs and social passions, the other a
life of reflection expressed in religion, science, and
the imitative arts. In the Life of Keason, if it
were brought to perfection, intelligence would be
. at once the universal method of practice and its
continual reward. All reflection would then be
applicable in action and all action fruitful in hap
piness. Though this be an ideal, yet everyone
gives it from time to time a partial embodiment

6 THE LIFE OF KEASON

when he practises useful arts, when his passions
happily lead him to enlightenment, or when his
fancy breeds visions pertinent to his ultimate
good. Everyone leads the Life of Reason in so
IT far as he finds a steady light behind the world s
glitter and a clear residuum of joy beneath pleas
ure or success. No experience not to be repented
of falls without its sphere. Every solution to a
doubt, in so far as it is not a new error, every
practical achievement not neutralised by a second
maladjustment consequent upon it, every consola
tion not the seed of another greater sorrow, may
be gathered together and built into this edifice.
The Life of Reason is the happy marriage of two
elements impulse and ideation which if wholly
divorced would reduce man to a brute or to a
maniac. The rational animal is generated by the
union of these two monsters. He is constituted
by ideas which have ceased to be visionary and
actions which have ceased to be vain.

Thus the Life of Reason is another
ofAr? eSUm name ^ or wna t in the widest sense of
the word, might be called Art. Opera
tions become arts when their purpose is conscious
and their method teachable. In perfect art the
whole idea is creative and exists only to be em
bodied, while every part of the product is rational
and gives delightful expression to that idea. Like
art, again, the Life of Reason is not a power but
a result, the spontaneous expression of liberal
genius in a favouring environment. Both art and

INTRODUCTION 7

reason have natural sources and meet with natural
checks; but when a process is turned successfully
into an art,, so that its issues have value and the
ideas that accompany it become practical and
cognitive, reflection, finding little that it cannot
in some way justify and understand, begins to
boast that it directs and has created the world in
which it finds itself so much at home. Thus if
art could extend its sphere to include every
activity in nature, reason, being everywhere exem
plified, might easily think itself omnipotent.
This ideal, far as it is from actual realisation, has
so dazzled men, that in their religion and mythical
philosophy they have often spoken as if it were
already actual and efficient. This anticipation
amounts, when taken seriously, to a confusion of
purposes with facts and of functions with causes,
a confusion which in the interests of wisdom and
progress it is important to avoid ; but these specu
lative fables, when we take them for what they
are poetic expressions of the ideal help us to
see how deeply rooted this ideal is in man s mind,
and afford us a standard by which to measure his
approaches to the rational perfection of which he
dreams. For the Life of Reason, being the sphere
of all human art, is man s imitation of divinity.

To study such an ideal, dimly ex
it has a nat- -, ., , .. , . , . .

urai basis pressed though it be in human exist-

whkh makes ence, is no prophetic or visionary un
it definable. , , . . *L 1 . . .. , \

dertaking. Every genuine ideal has a
natural basis; anyone may understand and safely

8 THE LIFE OF REASON

interpret it who is attentive to the life from which
it springs. To decipher the Life of Keason nothing
is needed but an analytic spirit and a judicious
love of man,, a love quick to distinguish success
from failure in his great and confused experiment
of living. The historian of reason should not be
a romantic poet, vibrating impotently to every im
pulse he finds afoot, without a criterion of excel
lence or a vision of perfection. Ideals are free,
but they are neither more numerous nor more
variable than the living natures that generate
them. Ideals are legitimate, and each initially
envisages a genuine and innocent good; but they
are not realisable together, nor even singly when
they have no deep roots in the world. Neither is
the philosopher compelled by his somewhat judi
cial office to be a satirist or censor, without sym
pathy for those tentative and ingenuous passions
out of which, after all, his own standards must
arise. He is the chronicler of human progress,
and to measure that progress he should be equally
attentive to the impulses that give it direction and
to the circumstances amid which it stumbles
toward its natural goal.

Modem hi- There is unfortunately no school of
losophy not modern philosophy to which a critique
of human progress can well be at
tached. Almost every school, indeed, can furnish
something useful to the critic, sometimes a
physical theory, sometimes a piece of logical
analysis. We shall need to borrow from cur-

INTKODUCTION 9

rent science and speculation the picture they
draw of man s conditions and environment, his
history and mental habits. These may furnish a
theatre and properties for our drama; but they
offer no hint of its plot and meaning. A great
imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-
half the learned world is amused in tinkering
obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet;
deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be
at last sound and invulnerable. The other half,
the naturalists who have studied psychology and
evolution, look at life from the outside, and the
processes of Nature make them forget her uses.
_ . . . Bacon indeed had prized science for

Positivism A

no positive adding to the comforts of life, a func
tion still commemorated by positivists
in their eloquent moments. Habitually, however,
when they utter the word progress it is, in their
mouths, a synonym for inevitable change, or at
best for change in that direction which they con
ceive to be on the whole predominant. If they
combine with physical speculation some elements
of morals, these are usually purely formal, to the
effect that happiness is to be pursued (probably,
alas ! because to do so is a psychological law) ; but
what happiness consists in we gather only from
casual observations or by putting together their
national prejudices and party saws.

The truth is that even this radical school, eman
cipated as it thinks itself, is suffering from the
after-effects of supernaturalism. Like children

10 THE LIFE OF KEASON

escaped from school, they find their whole happi
ness in freedom. They are proud of what they
have rejected, as if a great wit were required to
do so; but they do not know what they want. If
you astonish them by demanding what is their
positive ideal, further than that there should be
a great many people and that they should be all
alike, they will say at first that what ought to be
is obvious, and later they will submit the matter
to a majority vote. They have discarded the
machinery in which their ancestors embodied the
ideal; they have not perceived that those symbols
stood for the Life of Reason and gave fantastic
and embarrassed expression to what, in itself, is
pure humanity; and they have thus remained en
tangled in the colossal error that ideals are some
thing adventitious and unmeaning, not having a
soil in mortal life nor a possible fulfilment there.
The profound and pathetic ideas
Christian which inspired Christianity were at-

philosophy . ^ .

mythical: it tached in the beginning to ancient
misrepresents m yths and soon crystallised into many

facts and con-

ditions. new ones. The mythical manner per

vades Christian philosophy; but myth
succeeds in expressing ideal life only by misrep
resenting its history and conditions. This
method was indeed not original with the Fathers ;
they borrowed it from Plato, who appealed to
parables himself in an open and harmless fashion,
yet with disastrous consequences to his school.
Nor was he the first; for the instinct to regard

INTKODUCTION 11

poetic fictions as revelations of supernatural facts
is as old as the souFs primitive incapacity to dis
tinguish dreams from waking perceptions, sign
from thing signified, and inner emotions from
external powers. Such confusions, though in a
way they obey moral forces, make a rational esti
mate of things impossible. To misrepresent the
conditions and consequences of action is no merely
speculative error; it involves a false emphasis in
character and an artificial balance and co-ordina
tion among human pursuits. When ideals are

f hypostasised into powers alleged to provide for
their own expression, the Life of Reason cannot be
conceived; in theory its field of operation is pre-

1* empted and its function gone, while in practice its
inner impulses are turned awry by artificial stimu
lation and repression.

The Patristic systems, though weak in their
foundations, were extraordinarily wise and com
prehensive in their working out; and while they
inverted life they preserved it. Dogma added to
the universe fabulous perspectives; it interpolated
also innumerable incidents and powers which gave
a new dimension to experience. Yet the old world
remained standing in its strange setting, like the
Pantheon in modern Rome ; and, what is more im
portant, the natural springs of human action were
still acknowledged, and if a supernatural disci
pline was imposed, it was only because experience
and faith had disclosed a situation in which the
pursuit of earthly happiness seemed hopeless.

12 THE LIFE OF REASON

Nature was not destroyed by its novel appendages,
nor did reason die in the cloister: it hibernated
there, and could come back to its own in due sea
son, only a little dazed and weakened by its long
confinement. Such, at least, is the situation in
Catholic regions, where the Patristic philosophy
has not appreciably varied. Among Protestants
Christian dogma has taken a new and ambiguous
direction, which has at once minimised its disturb
ing effect in practice and isolated its primary illu
sion. The symptoms have been cured and the
disease driven in.

The tenets of Protestant bodies are
Liberal the- notoriously varied and on principle
subject to change. There is hardly a

attitude combination of tradition and spontane-

naturai world, ity which has not been tried in some
quarter. If we think, however, of
broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears
that in Protestantism myth, without disappear
ing, has changed its relation to reality : instead of
being an extension to the natural world myth has
become its substratum. Religion no longer re
veals divine personalities, future rewards, and ten
derer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriously
propose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a
purgatory to be shortened by prescribed devotions.
It merely gives the real world an ideal status and
teaches men to accept a natural life on super
natural grounds. The consequence is that the
most pious can give an unvarnished description of

INTRODUCTION 13

things. Even immortality and the idea of God
are submitted, in liberal circles, to scientific treat
ment. On the other hand, it would be hard to
conceive a more inveterate obsession than that
which keeps the attitude of these same minds in
appropriate to the objects they envisage. They
have accepted natural conditions; they will not
accept natural ideals. The Life of Keason has no
existence for them, because, although its field is
clear, they will not tolerate any human or finite
standard of value, and will not suffer extant in
terests, which can alone guide them in action or
judgment, to define the worth of life.

The after-effects of Hebraism are here contrary
to its foundations; for the Jews loved the world
so much that they brought themselves, in order
to win and enjoy it, to an intense concentration of
purpose; but this effort and discipline, which had
of course been mythically sanctioned, not only
failed of its object, but grew far too absolute and
sublime to think its object could ever have been
earthly; and the supernatural machinery which
was to have secured prosperity, while that still
enticed, now had to furnish some worthier object
for the passion it had artificially fostered. Fanat
icism consists in redoubling your effort when you
have forgotten your aim.

An earnestness which is out of proportion to
any knowledge or love of real things, which is
therefore dark and inward and thinks itself deeper
than the earth s foundations such an earnest-

14 THE LIFE OF REASON

ness, until culture turns it into intelligent inter
ests, will naturally breed a new mythology. It
will try to place some world of Afrites and shad
owy giants behind the constellations, which it finds
too distinct and constant to be its companions or
supporters; and it will assign to itself vague and
infinite tasks, for which it is doubtless better
equipped than for those which the earth now sets
before it. Even these, however, since they are
parts of an infinite whole, the mystic may (his
trionically, perhaps, yet zealously) undertake; but
as his eye will be perpetually fixed on something
invisible beyond, and nothing will be done for its
own sake or enjoyed in its own fugitive presence,
there will be little art and little joy in existence.
All will be a tossing servitude and illiberal mist,
where the parts will have no final values and the
whole no pertinent direction.
The Greeks ^ n Greek philosophy the situation is
thought far more auspicious. The ancients led a

LTh^physks rational life and envisaged the various
and morals, spheres of speculation as men might
whose central interests were rational. In physics
they leaped at once to the conception of a dynamic
unity and general evolution, thus giving that
background to human life which shrewd observa
tion would always have descried, and which mod
ern science has laboriously rediscovered. Two
great systems offered, in two legitimate directions,
what are doubtless the final and radical accounts
of physical being. Heraclitus, describing the im-

INTRODUCTION 15

mediate, found it to be in constant and pervasive

change: no substances, no forms, no identities

could be arrested there, but as in the

Heraclitus

and the im- human SOUl, SO in nature, all Was in-
mediate, stability, contradiction, reconstruction,
and oblivion. This remains the empirical fact ; and
we need but to rescind the artificial division which
Descartes has taught us to make between nature
and life, to feel again the absolute aptness of
Heraclitus s expressions. These were thought
obscure only because they were so disconcertingly
penetrating and direct. The immediate is what
nobody sees, because convention and reflection turn
existence, as soon as they can, into ideas; a man
who discloses the immediate seems profound, yet \
his depth is nothing but innocence recovered and
a sort of intellectual abstention. Mysticism,
scepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their
various ways tried to fall back on the immediate ;
but none of them has been ingenuous enough.
Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or de
lusive artifice to its direct observation. Heracli
tus remains the honest prophet of immediacy: a
mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a scep
tic who does not rely for his results on conven
tions unwittingly adopted, a transcendentalist
without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas.
The immediate is not, however, a good subject
for discourse, and the expounders of Heraclitus
were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. All
they could do was to iterate their master s maxim,

16 THE LIFE OF KEASON

and declare everything to be in flux. In suggest
ing laws of recurrence and a reason in which what
is common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus
had opened the door into another region : had he
passed through, his philosophy would have been
greatly modified, for permanent forms would have
forced themselves on his attention no less than
shifting materials. Such a Heraclitus would have
anticipated Plato; but the time for such a syn
thesis had not yet arrived.

Democritus At the opposite pole from imme-
nat d uran y diac y lies intelligibility. To reduce
intelligible. phenomena to constant elements, as
similar and simple as possible, and to conceive
their union and separation to obey constant laws,
is what a natural philosopher will inevitably do
so soon as his interest is not merely to utter
experience but to understand it. Democritus
brought this scientific ideal to its ultimate expres
sion. By including psychic existence in his
atomic system, he indicated a problem which
natural science has since practically abandoned
but which it may some day be compelled to take
up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross,
even for chemistry, and their quality would have
to undergo great transformation if they were to
support intelligibly psychic being as well ; but that
very grossness and false simplicity had its merits,
and science must be for ever grateful to the man
who at its inception could so clearly formulate its
mechanical ideal. That the world is not so in-

INTKODUCTION 17

telligible as we could wish is not to be wondered
at. In other respects also it fails to respond to
our ideals; yet our hope must be to find it more
propitious to the intellect as well as to all the arts
in proportion as we learn better how to live in it.

The atoms of what we call hydrogen or oxygen
may well turn out to be worlds, as the stars are
which make atoms for astronomy. Their inner or
ganisation might be negligible on our rude plane
of being; did it disclose itself, however, it would
be intelligible in its turn only if constant parts
and constant laws were discernible within each
system. So that while atomism at a given level
may not be a final or metaphysical truth, it will
describe, on every level, the practical and effica
cious structure of the world. We owe to Democ-
ritus this ideal of practical intelligibility; and he
is accordingly an eternal spokesman of reason.
His system, long buried with other glories of the
world, has been partly revived; and although it
cannot be verified in haste, for it represents an
ultimate ideal, every advance in science recon
stitutes it in some particular. Mechanism is not
one principle of explanation among others. In
natural philosophy, where to explain means to
discover origins, transmutations, and laws, mech
anism is explanation itself.

Heraclitus had the good fortune of having his
physics absorbed by Plato. It is a pity that De-
mocritus physics was not absorbed by Aristotle.
For with the flux observed, and mechanism con-

VOL. I. 2

18 THE LIFE OF REASON

ceived to explain it, the theory of existence is com
plete; and had a complete physical theory been
incorporated into the Socratic philosophy, wisdom
would have lacked none of its parts. Democri-
tus, however, appeared too late, when ideal sci
ence had overrun the whole field and initiated a
verbal and dialectical physics ; so that Aristotle, for
all his scientific temper and studies, built his
natural philosophy on a lamentable misunder
standing, and condemned thought to confusion
for two thousand years.
_ . If the happy freedom of the Greeks

Socrates and rr J

the autonomy from religious dogma made them the

first natural philosophers, their happy

political freedom made them the first moralists.

It was no accident that Socrates walked the Athe-

fnian agora; it was no petty patriotism that made
him shrink from any other scene. His science had
its roots there, in the personal independence, in
tellectual vivacity, and clever dialectic of his
countrymen. Ideal science lives in discourse; it
consists in the active exercise of reason, in sig
nification, appreciation, intent, and self-expres
sion. Its sum total is to know oneself, not as
psychology or anthropology might describe a man,

but to know, as the saying is, one s own mind.
Nor is he who knows his own mind forbidden to
change it; the dialectician has nothing to do with
future possibilities or with the opinion of anyone
but the man addressed. This kind of truth is
but adequate veracity; its only object is its own

INTRODUCTION 19

intent. Having developed in the spirit the con
sciousness of its meanings and purposes, Socrates
rescued logic and ethics for ever from authority.
With his friends the Sophists, he made man the
measure of all things, after bidding him measure |
himself, as they neglected to do, by his own ideal, j
That brave humanity which had first raised its
head in Hellas and had endowed so many things
in heaven and earth, where everything was
hitherto monstrous, with proportion and use, so
that man s works might justify themselves to his
mind, now found in Socrates its precise defini
tion; and it was naturally where the Life of Eea-
son had been long cultivated that it came finally
to be conceived.

Plato ave Socrates had, however, a plebeian

the ideal its strain in his humanity, and his utili-
fuii expression, tarianism, at least in its expression,
hardly did justice to what gives utility to life.
His condemnation for atheism if we choose to
take it symbolically was not altogether unjust:
the gods of Greece were not honoured explicitly
enough in his philosophy. Human good appeared
there in its principle ; you would not set a pilot to
mend shoes, because you knew your own purpose;
but what purposes a civilised soul might harbour,
and in what highest shapes the good might appear,
was a problem that seems not to have attracted
his genius. It was reserved to Plato to bring the
Socratic ethics to its sublimest expression and to
elicit from the depths of the Greek conscience

20 THE LIFE OF KEASON

those ancestral ideals which had inspired its leg
islators and been embodied in its sacred civic tra
ditions. The owl of Minerva flew, as Hegel says,
in the dusk of evening; and it was horror at the
abandonment of all creative virtues that brought
Plato to conceive them so sharply and to preach
them in so sad a tone. It was after all but the
love of beauty that made him censure the poets;
for like a true Greek and a true lover he wished
to see beauty flourish in the real world. It was
love of freedom that made him harsh to his ideal
citizens, that they might be strong enough to
preserve the liberal life. And when he broke
away from political preoccupations and turned to
the inner life, his interpretations proved the abso
lute sufficiency of the Socratic method; and he
left nothing pertinent unsaid on ideal love and
ideal immortality.

Beyond this point no rendering of the
supplied* its Life ^ Reason has ever been carried,
natural Aristotle improved the detail, and gave

breadth and precision to many a part.
If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour
and more enthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had
perfect sobriety and adequacy, with greater fidel
ity to the common sentiments of his race. Plato,
by virtue of his scope and plasticity, together
with a certain prophetic zeal, outran at times the
limits of the Hellenic and the rational; he saw
human virtue so surrounded and oppressed by
physical dangers that he wished to give it mythi-

INTRODUCTION 21

cal sanctions, and his fondness for transmigra
tion and nether punishments was somewhat more
than playful. If as a work of imagination his
philosophy holds the first place, Aristotle s has the
decisive advantage of being the unalloyed expres
sion of reason. In Aristotle the conception of
human nature is perfectly sound ; everything ideal
has a natural basis and everything natural an
ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly
digested and weighed, especially when the meagre
outlines are filled in with Plato s more discursive
expositions, will seem therefore entirely final.
The Life of Reason finds there its classic expli
cation.

Philosophy As ^ is improbable that there will

thus complete, S0 on be another people so free from

yet in need . . , , _

of restate- preoccupations, so gifted, and so for-
ment. tunate as the Greeks, or capable in

consequence of so well exemplifying humanity, so
also it is improbable that a philosopher will soon
arise with Aristotle s scope, judgment, or author
ity, one knowing so well how to be both reason
able and exalted. It might seem vain, therefore,
to try to do afresh what has been done before with
unapproachable success; and instead of writing
inferior things at great length about the Life of
Reason, it might be simpler to read and to propa
gate what Aristotle wrote with such immortal just
ness and masterly brevity. But times change;
and though the principles of reason remain the
same the facts of human life and of human con-

22 THE LIFE OF KEASON

science alter. A new background, a new basis of
application, appears for logic, and it may be use
ful to restate old truths in new words, the better
to prove their eternal validity. Aristotle is, in his
morals, Greek, concise, and elementary. As a
Greek, he mixes with the ideal argument illustra
tions, appreciations, and conceptions which are not
inseparable from its essence. In themselves, no
doubt, these accessories are better than what in
modern times would be substituted for them, being
less sophisticated and of a nobler stamp; but to
our eyes they disguise what is profound and uni
versal in natural morality by embodying it in
images which do not belong to our life. Our
direst struggles and the last sanctions of our
morality do not appear in them. The pagan
world, because its maturity was simpler than our
crudeness, seems childish to us. We do not find
there our sins and holiness, our love, charity, and
honour.

The Greek too would not find in our world the
things he valued most, things to which he sur
rendered himself, perhaps, with a more constant
self-sacrifice piety, country, friendship, and beau
ty ; and he might add that his ideals were rational
and he could attain them, while ours are extrava
gant and have been missed. Yet even if we ac
knowledged his greater good fortune, it would be
impossible for us to go back and become like him.
To make the attempt would show no sense of real
ity and little sense of humour. We must dress in

INTRODUCTION 23

our own clothes, if we do not wish to substitute a
masquerade for practical existence. What we canj
adopt from Greek morals is only the abstract prin
ciple of their development; their foundation in all*
the extant forces of human nature and their effort
toward establishing a perfect harmony among
them. These forces themselves have perceptibly
changed, at least in their relative power. Thus
we are more conscious of wounds to stanch and
wrongs to fight against, and less of goods to at
tain. The movement of conscience has veered;
the centre of gravity lies in another part of the
character.

Another circumstance that invites a restate
ment of rational ethics is the impressive illustra
tion of their principle which subsequent history
has afforded. Mankind has been making extraor
dinary experiments of which Aristotle could not
dream ; arid their result is calculated to clarify
even his philosophy. For in some respects it
needed experiments and clarification. He had
been led into a systematic fusion of dialectic with
physics, and of this fusion^all pretentio^us modern
philosophy is the aggravated extension. Socrates
pupils could not abandon his ideal principles, yet
they could not bear to abstain from physics
altogether ; they therefore made a mock physics in
moral terms, out of which theology was after
ward developed. Plato, standing nearer to
Socrates and being no naturalist by disposition,
never carried the fatal experiment beyond the

24 THE LIFE OF KEASON

mythical stage. He accordingly remained the
purer moralist, much as Aristotle s judgment may
be preferred in many particulars. Their relative
position may be roughly indicated by saying that
Plato had no physics and that Aristotle s physics
was false; so that ideal science in the one suf
fered from want of environment and control, while
in the other it suffered from misuse in a sphere
where it had no application.
Plato s What had happened was briefly this :

myths in lieu Plato, having studied many sorts of
rf physics. philosophy and being a bold and uni
versal genius, was not satisfied to leave all physi
cal questions pending, as his master had done.
He adopted, accordingly, Heraclitus s doctrine of
the immediate, which he now called the realm of
phenomena ; for what exists at any instant, if you
arrest and name it, turns out to have been an
embodiment of some logical essence, such as dis
course might define; in every fact some idea
makes its appearance, and such an apparition of
the ideal is a phenomenon. Moreover, another
philosophy had made a deep impression on Plato s
mind and had helped to develop Socratic defini
tions: Parmenides had called the concept of jure
Being the only reality; and to satisfy the strong
dialectic byVnich this doctrine was supported and
at the same time to bridge the infinite chasm
between one formless substance and many appear
ances irrelevant to it, Plato substituted the many
Socratic ideas, all of which were relevant to ap-

INTRODUCTION 25

pearance, for the one concept _ of_JParmenides.
Tlie ideas thus acquired what is called metapliYsi-

cal subsistence ; for they stood in the place of the
Eleatic Absolute, and at the same time were the
realities that phenomena manifested.

The technique of this combination is much to
be admired; but the feat is technical and adds
nothing to the significance of what Plato has to
say on any concrete subject. This barren triumph
was, however, fruitful in misunderstandings.
The characters and values a thing possessed were
now conceived to subsist apart from it, and might >
even have preceded it and caused its existence;
a mechanism composed of values and definitions
could thus be placed behind phenomena to con
stitute a substantial physical world. Such a
dream could not be taken seriously, until good
sense was wholly lost and a bevy of magic spirits
could be imagined peopling the infinite and yet
carrying on the business of earth. Aristotle re
jected the metaphysical subsistence of ideas, but
thought they might still be essences operative in
nature, if only they were identified with the life
or form of particular things. The dream thus
lost its frank wildness, but none of its inherent
incongruity: for the sense in which characters
and values make a thing what it is, is purely
dialectical. They give it its status in the ideal
world; but the appearance of these characters
and values here and now is what needs explan
ation in physics, an explanation which can "be

r ju>r~ tf x^vvt^i^^^y
1

26 THE LIFE OF EEASON

furnished, of course, only by the physical con-
/A catenation and distribution of causes.

Aristotle himself did not fail to
Aristotle s make this necessary distinction be-

final causes. . -, ,

Modern sci- tween efficient cause and formal es-
encecan sence ; but as his science was only

v expedients. natural history, and mechanism had no
plausibility in his eyes, the efficiency

of the cause was always due, in his view, to its
ideal quality; as in heredity the father s human
character, not his physical structure, might seem
to warrant the son s humanity. Every ideal,
before it could be embodied, had to pre-exist in
some other embodiment; but as when the ulti
mate purpose of the cosmos is considered it seems
to lie beyond any given embodiment, the highest
ideal must somehow exist disembodied. It must
pre-exist, thought Aristotle, in order to supply, by
way of magic attraction, a physical cause for per-

petual movement in the world.

It must be confessed, in justice to this consum
mate philosopher, who is not less masterly in the
use of knowledge than unhappy in divination, that
the transformation of the highest good into a
physical power is merely incidental with him, and
due to a want of faith (at that time excusable)
in mechanism and evolution. Aristotle s deity is
always a moral ideal and every detail in its defini
tion is based on discrimination between the better
and the worse. No accommodation to the ways
of nature is here allowed to cloud the kingdom of

INTRODUCTION 27

heaven ; this deity is not condemned to do whatever
happens nor to absorb whatever exists. It is mythi
cal only in its physical application ; in moral phi
losophy it remains a legitimate conception.

Truth certainly exists, if existence be not too
mean an attribute for that eternal realm which is
tenanted by ideals; but truth is repugnant to
physical or psychical being. Moreover, truth may
very well be identified with an impassible intellect,
which should do nothing but possess all truth, with
no point of view, no animal warmth, and no transi
tive process. Such an intellect and truth are ex
pressions having a different metaphorical back
ground and connotation, but, when thought out,
an identical import. They both attempt to evoke
that ideal standard which human thought pro
poses to itself. This function is their effective
essence. It insures their eternal fixity, and this
property surely endows them with a very genuine
and sublime reality. What is fantastic is only the
dynamic function attributed to them by Aristotle,
which obliges them to inhabit some fabulous ex
tension to the physical world. Even this physical
efficacy, however, is spiritualised as much as pos
sible, since deity is said to move the cosmos only
as an object of love or an object of knowledge may
move the mind. Such efficacy is imputed to a
hypostasised end, but evidently resides in fact in
the functioning and impulsive spirit that conceives
and pursues an ideal, endowing it with whatever
attraction it may seem to have. The absolute

28 THE LIFE OF REASON

intellect described by Aristotle remains,, therefore,
as pertinent to the Life of Eeason as Plato s idea
of the good. Though less comprehensive (for it
abstracts from all animal interests, from all pas
sion and mortality), it is more adequate and dis
tinct in the region it dominates. It expresses
sublimely the goal of speculative thinking; which
is none other than to live as much as may be in
the eternal and to absorb and be absorbed in the
truth.

The rest of ancient philosophy belongs to the
decadence and rests in physics on eclecticism and
in morals on despair. That creative breath which
had stirred the founders and legislators of Greece
no longer inspired their descendants. Helpless to
control the course of events, they took refuge in
abstention or in conformity, and their ethics
became a matter of private economy and senti
ment, no longer aspiring to mould the state or
give any positive aim to existence. The time was
approaching when both speculation and morals
-were to regard the other world; reason had abdi
cated the throne, and religion, after that brief
interregnum, resumed it for long ages.

Such are the threads which tradition puts into
the hands of an observer who at the present time
might attempt to knit the Life of Reason ideally
together. The problem is to unite a trustworthy
conception of the conditions under which man
lives with an adequate conception of his inter-

INTRODUCTION 29

ests. Both conceptions, fortunately, lie before
us. Heraclitus and Democritus, in systems
easily seen to be complementary, gave long
ago a picture of nature such as all later
observation, down to our own day, has done noth
ing but fill out and confirm. Psychology and
physics still repeat their ideas, often with richer
detail, but never with a more radical or prophetic
glance. Nor does the transcendental philosophy,
in spite of its self-esteem, add anytmng e^ntial.
It was a thing taken for granted in
ancient and scholastic philosophy that

true but in- a being dwelling, like man, in

consequential. ,, . -,. ,

the immediate, whose moments are in
flux, needed constructive reason to interpret his
experience and paint in his unstable consciousness
some symbolic picture of the world. To have
reverted to this constructive process and studied
its stages is an interesting achievement; but the
construction is already made by common-sense
and science, and it was visionary insolence in the
Germans to propose to make that construc
tion otherwise. Retrospective self-consciousness is
dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect and em
barrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous
operation, it has known perfectly how to make.
In the heat of scientific theorising or dialectical
argument it is sometimes salutary to be reminded
that we are men thinking; but, after all, it is
no news. We know that life is a dream, and how
should thinking be more ? Yet the thinking must

30 THE LIFE OF KEASON

go on, and the only vital question is to what prac
tical or poetic conceptions it is able to lead us.

Similarly the Socratic philosophy affords a
noble and genuine account of what goods may
be realised by living. Modern theory has not
done so much to help us here, however, as it has
in physics. It seldom occurs to modern moralists
that theirs is the science of all good and the art
of its attainment: they think only of

Verbal ethics. i

some set of categorical precepts or some
theory of moral sentiments, abstracting altogether
from the ideals reigning in society, in science, and
in art. They deal with the secondary question
What ought I to do? without having answered
the primary question, What ought to be? They
attach morals to religion rather than to politics,
and this religion unhappily long ago ceased to be
wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become
superstition overlaid with reasoning. They divide
man into compartments and the less they leave
in the one labelled "morality" the more sub
lime they think their morality is; and sometimes
pedantry and scholasticism are carried so far that
nothing but an abstract sense of duty remains in
the broad region which should contain all human
goods.

Such trivial sanctimony in morals is doubtless
due to artificial views about the conditions of wel
fare; the basis is laid in authority rather than in
human nature, and the goal in salvation rather
than in happiness. One great modern philoso-

INTRODUCTION 31

pher, however, was free from these preconceptions,
and might have reconstituted the Life of Eeason
had he had a sufficient interest in cul-
amTthe iuie. Spinoza brought man back into

Life of nature, and made him the nucleus of

all moral values, showing how he may
recognise his environment and how he may master
it. But Spinoza s sympathy with mankind fell
short of imagination ; any noble political or poeti
cal ideal eluded him. Everything impassioned
seemed to him insane, everything human neces
sarily petty. Man was to be a pious tame animal,
with the stars shining above his head. Instead
of imagination Spinoza cultivated mysticism,
which is indeed an alternative. A prophet in
speculation, he remained a levite in sentiment.
Little or nothing would need to be changed in his
system if the Life of Reason, in its higher ranges,
were to be grafted upon it; but such affiliation
is not necessary, and it is rendered unnatural by
the lack of sweep and generosity in Spinoza s
practical ideals.

For moral philosophy we are driven
classic sources back, then, upon the ancients ; but not,
of inspira- O f course, for moral inspiration. In
dustrialism and democracy, the French
Revolution, the Renaissance, and even the Catholic
system, which in the midst of ancient illusions
enshrines so much tenderness and wisdom, still
live in the world, though forgotten by philoso
phers, and point unmistakably toward their several

32 THE LIFE OF REASON

goals. Our task is not to construct but only
to interpret ideals, confronting them with one
another and with the conditions which, for the
most part, they alike ignore. There is no need
of refuting anything, for the will which is behind
all ideals and behind most dogmas cannot itself
be refuted; but it may be enlightened and led to
reconsider its intent, when its satisfaction is seen
to be either naturally impossible or inconsistent
with better things. The age of controversy is
past; that of interpretation has succeeded.

Here, then, is the programme of the following
work : Starting with the immediate flux, in which
all objects and impulses are given, to describe the
Life of Eeason; that is, to note what facts and
purposes seem to be primary, to show how the con
ception of nature and life gathers around them,
and to point to the ideals of thought and action
which are approached by this gradual mastering
of experience by reason. A great task, which it
would be beyond the powers of a writer in this age
either to execute or to conceive, had not the Greeks
drawn for us the outlines of an ideal culture at
a time when life was simpler than at present and
individual intelligence more resolute and free.

REASON IN COMMON SENSE

CHAPTER I

THE BIRTH OF REASON"

Whether Chaos or Order lay at the beginning
of things is a question once much debated in the
schools but afterward long in abeyance, not so
much because it had been solved as
because one party had been silenced

an Order, by social pressure. The question is

called Chaos . \ ,

whenincom- bound to recur in an age when obser-
patibie with a va tion and dialectic again freely con
front each other. Naturalists look back
to chaos since they observe everything growing
from seeds and shifting its character in regen
eration. The order now established in the world
may be traced back to a situation in which it
did not appear. Dialecticians, on the other
hand, refute this presumption by urging that
every collocation of things must have been pre
ceded by another collocation in itself no less defi
nite and precise ; and further that some principle
of transition or continuity must always have
obtained, else successive states \vould stand in no
relation to one another, notably not in the relation
of cause and effect, expressed in a natural law,
which is presupposed in this instance. Potentiali-
35

36 THE LIFE OF REASON

ties are dispositions,, and a disposition involves an
order,, as does also the passage from any specific
potentiality into act. Thus the world, we are told,
must always have possessed a structure.

The two views may perhaps be reconciled if we
take each with a qualification. Chaos doubtless
has existed and will return nay, it reigns now,
very likely, in the remoter and inmost parts of
the universe if by chaos we understand a nature
containing none of the objects we are wont to dis
tinguish, a nature such that human life and human
thought would be impossible in its bosom ; but this
nature must be presumed to have an order, an
order directly importing, if the tendency of its
movement be taken into account, all the complexi
ties and beauties, all the sense and reason which
exist now. Order is accordingly continual; but
only when order means not a specific arrangement,
favourable to a given form of life, but any arrange
ment whatsoever. The process by which an ar-
rangement which is essentially unstable gradu
ally shifts cannot be said to aim at every stage
which at any moment it involves. For the process
passes beyond. It presently abolishes all the
forms which may have arrested attention and gen
erated love; its initial energy defeats every pur
pose which we may fondly attribute to it. Nor
is it here necessary to remind ourselves that to
call results their own causes is always preposter
ous; for in this case even the mythical sense
which might be attached to such language is inap-

THE BIKTH OF KEASON 37

plicable. Here the process, taken in the gross,
does not,, even by mechanical necessity, support the
value which is supposed to guide it. That value
is realised for a moment only ; so that if we impute
to Cronos any intent to beget his children we
must also impute to him an intent to devour them.
Of course the various states of the

Absolute

order, or world, when we survey them retro-
static im- spectively, constitute another and now
potent, indif- static order called historic truth. To
this absolute and impotent order every
detail is essential. If we wished to abuse language
so much as to speak of will in an " Absolute "
where change is excluded, so that nothing can be or
be conceived beyond it, we might say that the Ab
solute willed everything that ever exists, and that
the eternal order terminated in every fact indis
criminately; but such language involves an after
image of motion and life, of preparation, risk, and
subsequent accomplishment, adventures all pre
supposing refractory materials and excluded from
eternal truth by its very essence. The only function
those traditional metaphors have is to shield con
fusion and sentimentality. Because Jehovah once
fought for the Jews, we need not continue to say
that the truth is solicitous about us, when it is only
we that are fighting to attain it. The universe can
wish particular things only in so far as particu
lar beings wish them ; only in its relative capacity
can it find things good, and only in its relative
capacity can it be good for anything.

38 THE LIFE OF KEASON

The efficacious or physical order which exists at
any moment in the world and out of which the
next moment s order is developed, may accordingly
be termed a relative chaos: a chaos, because the
values suggested and supported by the second
moment could not have belonged to the first; but
merely a relative chaos, first because it probably
carried values of its own which rendered it an
order in a moral and eulogistic sense, and sec
ondly because it was potentially, by virtue of
its momentum, a basis for the second moment s
,-jralues as well.

Human life, when it begins to pos-
in expen- gegg intrinsic value, is an incipient

ence order is

relative to order in the midst of what seems a
whiciTde vas ^ though, to some extent, a vanish-
termine the ing chaos. This reputed chaos can be
deci P hered and appreciated by man
only in proportion as the order in him
self is confirmed and extended. For man s con
sciousness is evidently practical; it clings to his
fate, registers, so to speak, the higher and lower
temperature of his fortunes, and, so far as it can,
represents the agencies on which those fortunes
depend. When this dramatic vocation of con
sciousness has not been fulfilled at all, conscious
ness is wholly confused; the world it envisages
seems consequently a chaos. Later, if .experience
has fallen into shape, and there are settled cate
gories and constant objects in human discourse,
the inference is drawn that the original dis-

THE BIRTH OF REASON 39

position of things was also orderly and indeed
mechanically conducive to just those feats of
instinct and intelligence which have been since
accomplished. A theory of origins, of substance,
and of natural laws may thus be framed and
accepted, and may receive confirmation in the
further march of events. It will be observed, how
ever, that what is credibly asserted about the past
is not a report which the past was itself able to
make when it existed nor one it is now able, in
some oracular fashion, to formulate and to impose
upon us. The report is a rational construction
based and seated in present experience; it has no
cogency for the inattentive and no existence for
the ignorant. Although the universe, then, may
not have come from chaos, human experience cer
tainly has begun in a private and dreamful chaos
of its own, out of which it still only partially and
momentarily emerges. The history of this awa
kening is of course not the same as that of
the environing world ultimately discovered; it is
the history, however, of that discovery itself, of the
knowledge through which alone the world can be
revealed. We may accordingly dispense ourselves
from preliminary courtesies to the real universal
order, nature, the absolute, and the gods. We
shall make their acquaintance in due season and
better appreciate their moral status, if we strive
merely to recall our own experience, and to retrace,
the visions and reflections out of which those ap
paritions have grown.

40 THE LIFE OF EEASON

The discov- To revert to primordial feeling is an
eredcon- exercise in mental disintegration, not
reason not a ^ ea ^ ^ science. We might, indeed,
its beginning. as i n animal psychology, retrace the
situations in which instinct and sense seem first
to appear and write, as it were, a genealogy of rea
son based on circumstantial evidence. Reason
was born, as it has since discovered, into a world
already wonderfully organised, in which it found
its precursor in what is called life, its seat in an
animal body of unusual plasticity, and its func
tion in rendering that body s volatile instincts and
sensations harmonious with one another and with
the outer world on which they depend. It did
not arise until the will or conscious stress, by which
any modification of living bodies inertia seems
to be accompanied, began to respond to repre
sented objects, and to maintain that inertia not
absolutely by resistance but only relatively and
indirectly through labour. Reason has thus super
vened at the last stage of an adaptation which
had long been carried on by irrational and even
unconscious processes. Nature preceded, with
all that fixation of impulses and conditions which
gives reason its tasks and its point-d appui.
Nevertheless, such a matrix or cradle for reason
belongs only externally to its life. The descrip
tion of conditions involves their previous discov
ery and a historian equipped with many data and
many analogies of thought. Such scientific re
sources are absent in those first moments of

THE BIRTH OF REASON 41

rational living which we here wish to recall; the
first chapter in reason s memoirs would no more
entail the description of its real environment than
the first chapter in human history would include
true accounts of astronomy, psychology, and ani
mal evolution.

The flux I n order to begin at the beginning

first. we must try to fall back on uninter-

preted feeling, as the mystics aspire to do. We
need not expect, however, to find peace there, for
the immediate is in flux. Pure feeling rejoices
in a logical nonentity very deceptive to dialectical
minds. They often think, when they fall back on
elements necessarily indescribable, that they have
come upon true nothingness. If they are mys
tics, distrusting thought and craving the large
ness of indistinction, they may embrace this
alleged nothingness with joy, even if it seem posi
tively painful, hoping to find rest there through
self-abnegation. If on the contrary they are
rationalists they may reject the immediate with
scorn and deny that it exists at all, since in their
books they cannot define it satisfactorily. Both
mystics and rationalists, however, are deceived by
their mental agility ; the immediate exists, even if
dialectic cannot explain it. What the rationalist
calls nonentity is the substrate and locus of all
ideas, having the obstinate reality of matter, the
crushing irrationality of existence itself; and one
who attempts to override it becomes to that extent
an irrelevant rhapsodist, dealing with thin after-

42 THE LIFE OF EEASON

images of being. Nor has the mystic who sinks
into the immediate much better appreciated the
situation. This immediate is not God but chaos;
its nothingness is pregnant, restless, and brutish;
it is that from which all things emerge in so far
as they have any permanence or value, so that to
lapse into it again is a dull suicide and no salva
tion. Peace, which is after all what the mystic
seeks, lies not in indistinction but in perfection.
If he reaches it in a measure himself, it is by the
traditional discipline he still practises, not by his
heats or his languors.

The seed-bed of reason lies, then, in the imme
diate, but what reason draws thence is momentum
and power to rise above its source. It is the per
turbed immediate itself that finds or at least seeks
its peace in reason, through which it comes in
sight of some sort of ideal permanence. When
the flux manages to form an eddy and to main
tain by breathing and nutrition what we call a
life, it affords some slight foothold and object for
thought and becomes in a measure like the ark
in the desert, a moving habitation for the eternal.
Life begins to have some value and

JLife the nxa- c

ationofin- continuity so soon as there is some
thing definite that lives and something
definite to live for. The primacy of will, as
Fichte and Schopenhauer conceived it, is a mythi
cal way of designating this situation. Of course
a will can have no being in the absence of reali
ties or ideas marking its direction and contrast-

THE BIRTH OF REASON 43

ing the eventualities it seeks with those it flies
from ; and tendency, no less than movement, needs
an organised medium to make it possible, while
aspiration and fear involve an ideal world. Yet
a principle of choice is not deducible from mere
ideas, and no interest is involved in the formal
relations of things. All survey needs an arbitrary
starting-point; all valuation rests on an irrational
bias. The absolute flux cannot be physically ar
rested; but what arrests it ideally is the fixing of
some point in it from which it can be measured
and illumined. Otherwise it could show no form
and maintain no preference; it would be impos
sible to approach or recede from a represented
state, and to suffer or to exert will in view of
events. The irrational fate that lodges the tran
scendental self in this or that body, inspires it
with definite passions, and subjects it to particular
buffets from the outer world this is the prime
condition of all observation and inference, of all
failure or success.

Primary Those sensations in which a transi-

duaiities. tion is contained need only analysis to
yield two ideal and related terms two points in
space or two characters in feeling. Hot and cold,
here and there, good and bad, now and then, are
T dyads that spring into being when the flux accen
tuates some term and so makes possible a dis
crimination of parts and directions in its own
movement. An initial attitude sustains incipient
interests. What we first discover in ourselves,

44 THE LIFE OF KEASON

before the influence we obey has given rise to any
definite idea, is the working of instincts already
in motion. Impulses to appropriate and to reject
first teach us the points of the compass, and space
itself, like charity, begins at home.
First grop- The guide in early sensuous educa-

ings. in- tion is the same that conducts the
nucleus of whole Life of Eeason, namely, impulse
reason. checked by experiment, and experi

ment judged again by impulse. What teaches the
child to distinguish the nurse s breast from sundry
blank or disquieting presences? What induces
him to arrest that image, to mark its associates,
and to recognise them with alacrity? The dis
comfort of its absence and the comfort of its
possession. To that image is attached the chief
satisfaction he knows, and the force of that
satisfaction disentangles it before all other images
from the feeble and fluid continuum of his life.
What first awakens in him a sense of reality is
what first is able to appease his unrest.

Had the group of feelings, now welded together
in fruition, found no instinct in him to awaken
and become a signal for, the group would never
have persisted; its loose elements would have
been allowed to pass by unnoticed and would
not have been recognised when they recurred.
Experience would have remained absolute inex
perience, as foolishly perpetual as the gurglings
of rivers or the flickerings of sunlight in a grove.
But an instinct was actually present, so formed as

THE BIRTH OF REASON 45

to be aroused by a determinate stimulus; and the
image produced by that stimulus,, when it came,
could have in consequence a meaning and an in
dividuality. It seemed by divine right to signify
something interesting, something real, because by
natural contiguity it flowed from something per
tinent and important to life. Every accompany
ing sensation which shared that privilege, or in
time was engrossed in that function, would ulti
mately become a part of that conceived reality, a
quality of that thing.

The same primacy of impulses, irrational in
themselves but expressive of bodily functions, is
observable in the behaviour of animals, and in
those dreams, obsessions, and primary passions
which in the midst of sophisticated life sometimes
lay bare the obscure groundwork of human nature.
Reason s work is there undone. We can observe
sporadic growths, disjointed fragments of rational
ity, springing up in a moral wilderness. In the
passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to
the sufferer, but which is doubtless the spring-
flood of hereditary instincts accidentally let loose,
suddenly checks the young man s gayety, dispels
his random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very
breath; and when he looks for a cause to explain
his suspended faculties, he can find it only in the
presence or image of another being, of whose char
acter, possibly, he knows nothing and whose beauty
may not be remarkable; yet that image pursues
him everywhere, and he is dominated by an unac-

46 THE LIFE OF REASON

customed tragic earnestness and a new capacity
for suffering and joy. If the passion be strong
there is no previous interest or duty that will be
remembered before it; if it be lasting the whole
life may be reorganised by it; it may impose new
habits, other manners, and another religion. Yet
what is the root of all this idealism? An irra
tional instinct, normally intermittent, such as all
dumb creatures share, which has here managed to
dominate a human soul and to enlist all the men
tal powers in its more or less permanent service,
upsetting their usual equilibrium. This madness,
however, inspires method; and for the first time,
perhaps, in his life, the man has something to
live for. The blind affinity that like a magnet
draws all the faculties around it, in so uniting
them, suffuses them with an unwonted spiritual
light.

Better and Here, on a small scale and on a pre-

fumiLnentai car ^ ous foundation, we may see clearly
categories. illustrated and foreshadowed that Life
of Reason which is simply the unity given to all
existence by a mind in love with the good. In the
higher reaches of human nature, as much as in
the lower, rationality depends on distinguishing
the excellent; and that distinction can be made,
in the last analysis, only by an irrational impulse.
As life is a better form given to force, by which
the universal flux is subdued to create and
serve a somewhat permanent interest, so rea
son is a better form given to interest itself, by

THE BIRTH OF REASON 47

which it is fortified and propagated,, and ulti
mately, perhaps, assured of satisfaction. The
substance to which this form is given remains
irrational; so that rationality, like all excellence,
is something secondary and relative, requiring a
natural being to possess or to impute it. When
definite interests are recognised and the values of
things are estimated by that standard, action at
the same time veering in harmony with that esti
mation, then reason has been born and a moral
world has arisen.

CHAPTEK II

FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS

Consciousness is a born hermit.

Dreams

before Though subject, by divine dispensa-

thoughts. tion ^ to gpells of fervour and a p a thy 7

like a singing bird, it is at first quite unconcerned
about its own conditions or maintenance. To
acquire a notion of such matters, or an interest in
them, it would have to lose its hearty simplicity
and begin to reflect; it would have to forget the
present with its instant joys in order laboriously
to conceive the absent and the hypothetical. The
body may be said to make for self-preservation,
since it has an organic equilibrium which, when
not too rudely disturbed, restores itself by growth
and co-operative action; but no such principle
appears in the soul. Foolish in the beginning
and generous in the end, consciousness thinks of
nothing so little as of its own interests. It is lost
in its objects; nor would it ever acquire even an
indirect concern in its future, did not love of
things external attach it to their fortunes. At
tachment to ideal terms is indeed what gives con
sciousness its continuity; its parts have no rele
vance or relation to one another save what they
48

FIRST STEPS 49

acquire by depending on the same body or repre
senting the same objects. Even when conscious
ness grows sophisticated and thinks it cares for
itself, it really cares only for its ideals; the world
it pictures seems to it beautiful, and it may inci
dentally prize itself also, when it has come to re
gard itself as a part of that world. Initially, how
ever, it is free even from that honest selfishness;
it looks straight out; it is interested in the move
ments it observes; it swells with the represented
world, suffers with its commotion, and subsides,
no less willingly, in its interludes of calm.

Natural history and psychology arrive at con
sciousness from the outside, and consequently give
it an artificial articulation and rationality which
are wholly alien to its essence. These sciences
infer feeling from habit or expression; so that
only the expressible and practical aspects of feel
ing figure in their calculation. But these aspects
are really peripheral; the core is an irresponsible,
ungoverned, irrevocable dream. Psychologists
have discussed perception ad nauseam and become
horribly entangled in a combined idealism and
physiology; for they must perforce approach the
subject from the side of matter, since all science
and all evidence is external; nor could they ever
reach consciousness at all if they did not observe
its occasions and then interpret those occasions
dramatically. At the same time, the inferred
mind they subject to examination will yield noth
ing but ideas, and it is a marvel how such a dream
VOL. I 4

50 THE LIFE OF REASON

can regard those natural objects from which the
psychologist has inferred it. Perception is in fact
no primary phase of consciousness; it is an ulte
rior practical function acquired by a dream which
has become symbolic of its conditions, and there
fore relevant to its own destiny. Such relevance
and symbolism are indirect and slowly acquired;
their status cannot be understood unless we regard
them as forms of imagination happily grown sig
nificant. In imagination, not in perception, lies
the substance of experience, while knowledge and
reason are but its chastened and ultimate form.

Every actual animal is somewhat

1 he mind *

vegetates un- dull and somewhat mad. He will at
controlled times miss his signals and stare va-

save by

physical cantly when he might well act, while

at other times he will run off into con
vulsions and raise a dust in his own brain to no
purpose. These imperfections are so human that
we should hardly recognise ourselves if we could
shake them off altogether. Not to retain any dul-
ness would mean to possess untiring attention and
universal interests, thus realising the boast about
deeming nothing human alien to us; while to be
absolutely without folly would involve perfect self-
knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man
known to history flourishes within a dullard and
holds a lunatic in leash. He is encased in a pro
tective shell of ignorance and insensibility which
keeps him from being exhausted and confused by
this too complicated world; but that integument

FIRST STEPS 51

blinds him at the same time to many of his near*
est and highest interests. He is amused by the
antics of the brute dreaming within his breast;
he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amuse
ment which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus
the best human intelligence is still decidedly bar-
barous ; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool
at court.

If consciousness could ever have the function
of guiding conduct better than instinct can, in the
beginning it would be most incompetent for that
office. Only the routine and equilibrium which
healthy instinct involves keep thought and will at
all within the limits of sanity. The predeter
mined interests we have as animals

Internal

order fortunately focus our attention on

supervenes. pract i ca i things, pulling it back, like a
ball with an elastic cord, within the radius of
pertinent matters. Instinct alone compels us to
neglect and seldom to recall the irrelevant infinity
of ideas. Philosophers have sometimes said that
all ideas come from experience; they never could
have been poets and must have forgotten that they
were ever children. The great difficulty in edu
cation is to get experience out of ideas. Shame,
conscience, and reason continually disallow and
ignore what consciousness presents; and what are
they but habit and latent instinct asserting them
selves and forcing us to disregard our midsum
mer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely
reversions to a condition in which present con-

52 THE LIFE OF EEASON

sciousness is in the ascendant and has escaped the
control of unconscious forces. We speak of people
being " out of their senses," when they have in
J/\ fact fallen back into them; or of those who have
" lost their mind/ when they have lost merely that
habitual control over consciousness which pre
vented it from flaring into all sorts of obsessions
and agonies. Their bodies having become de
ranged, their minds, far from correcting that
derangement, instantly share and betray it. A
dream is always simmering below the conventional
surface of speech and reflection. Even in the
highest reaches and serenest meditations of science
it sometimes breaks through. Even there we are
seldom constant enough to conceive a truly natural
world; somewhere passionate, fanciful, or magic
elements will slip into the scheme and baffle
rational ambition.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with
itself or with its environment, perishes outright.
Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set
themselves no limit; they lapse only when the
corporeal frame that sustains them yields to cir
cumstances and changes its habit. If they are
unstable at all, it is because they ordinarily corre
spond to strains and conjunctions which a vig
orous body overcomes, or which dissolve the body
altogether. A pain not incidental to the play of
practical instincts may easily be recurrent, and it
might be perpetual if even the worst habits were
not intermittent and the most useless agitations

FIRST STEPS 53

exhausting. Some respite will therefore ensue
upon pain, but no magic cure. Madness, in like
manner, if pronounced, is precarious, but when
speculative enough to be harmless or not strong
enough to be debilitating, it too may last for
ever.

An imaginative life may therefore exist para-
sitically in a man, hardly touching his action or
environment. There is no possibility of exorcis
ing these apparitions by their own power. A
nightmare does not dispel itself; it endures until
the organic strain which caused it is relaxed either
by natural exhaustion or by some external in
fluence. Therefore human ideas are still for the
most part sensuous and trivial, shifting with the
chance currents of the brain, and representing
nothing, so to speak, but personal temperature.
Personal temperature, moreover, is sometimes
tropical. There are brains like a South Ameri
can jungle, as there are others like an Arabian
desert, strewn with nothing but bones. While a
passionate sultriness prevails in the mind there is
no end to its luxuriance. Languages intricately
articulate, flaming mythologies, metaphysical per
spectives lost in infinity, arise in remarkable
profusion. In time, however, there comes a
change of climate and the whole forest dis
appears.

It is easy, from the stand-point of acquired prac
tical competence, to deride a merely imaginative
life. Derision, however, is not interpretation, and

54 THE LIFE OF SEASON

the better method of overcoming erratic ideas is
to trace them out dialectically and see if they will
not recognise their own fatuity. The most irre
sponsible vision has certain principles of order and
j- I valuation by which it estimates itself ; and in these
I principles the Life of Eeason is already broached,
however halting may be its development. We
should lead ourselves out of our dream, as the
Israelites were led out of Egypt, by the promise
and eloquence of that dream itself. Otherwise we
^ might kill the goose that lays the golden egg, and
by proscribing imagination abolish science,
intrinsic Visionary experience has a first

pleasure in value in its possible pleasantness.
Why any form of feeling should be de
lightful is not to be explained transcendentally :
a physiological law may, after the fact, render
every instance predictable; but no logical affinity
between the formal quality of an experience and
the impulse to welcome it will thereby be disclosed.
We find, however, that pleasure suffuses certain
states of mind and pain others; which is another
A way of saying that, for no reason, we love the
first and detest the second. The polemic which
certain moralists have waged against pleasure and
in favour of pain is intelligible when we remem
ber that their chief interest is edification, and that
ability to resist pleasure and pain alike is a val
uable virtue in a world where action and renun
ciation are the twin keys to happiness. But to
deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil

FIKST STEPS 55

is a grotesque affectation: it amounts to giving
"good" and " evil " artificial definitions and there-
Pleasure a by reducing ethics to arbitrary verbi-
good, age. Not only is good that adherence i

of the will to experience of which pleasure is the
basal example, and evil the corresponding rejec
tion which is the very essence of pain, but when
we pass from good and evil in sense to their high
est embodiments, pleasure remains eligible and *
pain something which it is a duty to prevent. A
man who without necessity deprived any person of
a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a
contemptible knave, and the person so injured
would be the first to declare it, nor could the high
est celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that
sentence. For it suffices, that one being, however
weak, loves or abhores anything, no matter how
slightly , x for that thing to acquire a proportionate ^
value which no chorus of contradiction ringing
through all the spheres can ever wholly abolish.
An experience good or bad in itself remains so
for ever, and its inclusion in a more general order
of things can only change that totality propor
tionately to the ingredient absorbed, which will
infect the mass, so far as it goes, with its own
colour. The more pleasure a universe can yield,
other things being equal, the more beneficent and X
generous is its general nature; the more pains its
constitution involves, the darker and more malign
is its total temper. To deny this would seem im
possible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing

56 THE LIFE OF EEASON

people will not maintain when they are slaves to
superstition; and candour and a sense of justice
are,, in such a case, the first things lost.

Pleasures differ sensibly in inten-

but not pur

sued or re- sity ; but the intensest pleasures are

often the blindest > and it is hard to
suffuses an recall or estimate a feeling with which

no definite and complex object is
conjoined. The first step in making pleasure
; intelligible and capable of being pursued is to make
\ . it pleasure in something. The object it suffuses
acquires a value, and gives the pleasure itself a
place in rational life. The pleasure can now be
named, its variations studied in reference to
changes in its object, and its comings and goings
foreseen in the order of events. The more articu-
. late the world that produces emotion the more
controllable and recoverable is the emotion itself.
. Therefore diversity and order in ideas makes the
life of pleasure richer and easier to lead. A volu
minous dumb pleasure might indeed outweigh the
pleasure spread thin over a multitude of tame
perceptions, if we could only weigh the two in one
scale; but to do so is impossible, and in memory
and prospect, if not in experience, diversified
pleasure must needs carry the day.
Subhuman Here we come upon a crisis in

delights. human development which shows
clearly how much the Life of Eeason is a natural
thing, a growth that a different course of events
might well have excluded. Laplace is reported to

FIRST STEPS 57

have said on his death-bed that science was mere
trifling and that nothing was real but love. Love,
for such a man, doubtless involved objects and
ideas : it was love of persons. The same revulsion
of feeling may, however, be carried further.
Lucretius says that passion is a torment because
its pleasures are not pure, that is, because they are
mingled with longing and entangled in vexatious
things. Pure pleasure would be without ideas, f-4-
Many a man has found in some moment of his
life an unutterable joy which made all the rest of
it seem a farce, as if a corpse should play it was
living. Mystics habitually look beneath the Life
of Reason for the substance and infinity of happi
ness. In all these revulsions, and many others,
there is a certain justification, inasmuch as sys
tematic living is after all an experiment, as is the
formation of animal bodies, and the inorganic
pulp out of which these growths have come may
very likely have had its own incommunicable val
ues, its absolute thrills, which we vainly try to
remember and to which, in moments of dissolu
tion, we may half revert. Protoplasmic pleasures
and strains may be the substance of consciousness ;
and as matter seeks its own level, and as the sea
and the flat waste to which all dust returns have
a certain primordial life and a certain sublimity,
so all passions and ideas, when spent, may re
join the basal note of feeling, and enlarge their - r
volume as they lose their form. This loss of form
may not be unwelcome, if it is the formless that,

58 THE LIFE OF KEASON

by anticipation, speaks through what is surrender
ing its being. Though to acquire or impart form
is delightful in art, in thought, in generation, in
I government, yet a euthanasia of finitude is also
known. All is not affectation in the poet who
says, "Now more than ever seems it rich to die" ;
and, without any poetry or affectation, men may
love sleep, and opiates, and every luxurious escape
from humanity.

The step by which pleasure and pain are at-
i.tached to ideas, so as to be predictable and to
become factors in action, is therefore by no means
irrevocable. It is a step, however, in the direc
tion of reason; and though reason s path is only
one of innumerable courses perhaps open to ex-
,istence, it is the only one that we are tracing here ;
{the only one, obviously, which human discourse is
competent to trace.

Animal When consciousness begins to add

living. diversity to its intensity, its value is no

longer absolute and inexpressible. The felt varia
tions in its tone are attached to the observed
movement of its objects ; in these objects its values
are imbedded. A world loaded with dramatic
values may thus arise in imagination ; terrible and
delightful presences may chase one another across
the void; life will be a kind of music made by all
the senses together. Many animals probably have
this form of experience; they are not wholly sub
merged in a vegetative stupor; they can discern
what they love or fear. Yet all this is still a

FIRST STEPS 59

disordered apparition that reels itself off amid
sporadic movements,, efforts, and agonies. Now
gorgeous, now exciting, now indifferent, the land
scape brightens and fades with the day. If a dog,
while sniffing about contentedly, sees afar off his
master arriving after long absence, the change in
the animal s feeling is not merely in the quantity
of pure pleasure; a new circle of sensations ap
pears, with a new principle governing interest and
desire; instead of waywardness subjection, instead
of freedom love. But the poor brute asks for no
reason why his master went, why he has come
again, why he should be loved, or why pres
ently while lying at his feet you forget him and
begin to grunt and dream of the chase all that
is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such
experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital
rhythm; its story might be told in dithyrambic
verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every
event is providential, every act unpremeditated.
Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have Jt
met together : you depend wholly on divine favour,
yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguish
able from your own life. This is the condition
to which some forms of piety invite men to return ;
and it lies in truth not far beneath the level of
ordinary human consciousness.
Causes at The story which such animal experi-

last dis- ence contains, however, needs only to ,
be better articulated in order to dis-
close its underlying machinery. The figures even

60 THE LIFE OF REASON

of that disordered drama have their exits and their
entrances ; and their cues can be gradually discov
ered by a being capable of fixing his attention and
retaining the order of events. Thereupon a third -
step is made in imaginative experience. As pleas
ures and pains were formerly distributed among
objects, so objects are now marshalled into a world.
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, said a
poet who stood near enough to fundamental
human needs and to the great answer which art
and civilisation can make to them,, to value the
Life of Reason and think it sublime. To discern
causes is to turn vision into knowledge and motion
into action. It is to fix the associates of things,
so that their respective transformations are col
lated, and they become significant of one another.
In proportion as such understanding advances
each moment of experience becomes consequen
tial and prophetic of the rest. The calm places
in life are filled with power and its spasms with
resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind,
for of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden;
no event can disconcert it altogether, because it
sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape
from the worst predicament; and whereas each
moment had been formerly filled with nothing but
its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now
makes room for the lesson of what went before
and surmises what may be the plot of the whole.

At the threshold of reason there is a kind of
choice. Not all impressions contribute equally to

FIRST STEPS 61

the new growth; many, in fact, which were for
merly equal in rank to the best, now grow obscure.
Attention ignores them, in its haste to arrive at
what is significant of something more. Nor are
the principles of synthesis, by which the aristo
cratic few establish their oligarchy, themselves un
equivocal. The first principles of logic are like
the senses, few but arbitrary. They might have
been quite different and yet produced, by a now
unthinkable method, a language no less significant
than the one we speak. Twenty-six letters may
suffice for a language, but they are a wretched
minority among all possible sounds. So the
forms of perception and the categories of thought,
which a grammarian s philosophy might think
primordial necessities, are no less casual than
words or their syntactical order. Why, we may
ask, did these forms assert themselves here?
What principles of selection guide mental growth ?
To give a logical ground for such a selection is
evidently impossible, since it is logic itself that is
to be accounted for. A natural ground is, in
strictness, also irrelevant, since natural connec
tions, where thought has not reduced them to a
sort of equivalence and necessity, are mere data
and juxtapositions. Yet it is not necessary to
leave the question altogether unanswered. By
using our senses we may discover, not indeed why
each sense has its specific quality or exists at all,
but what are its organs and occasions. In like
manner we may, by developing the Life of Reason,

62 THE LIFE OF REASON

come to understand its conditions. When con
sciousness awakes the body has, as we long after-
Attention ward discover, a definite organisation.
bodiiy d im- Without guidance from reflection bod-
puise. ily processes have been going on, and

most precise affinities and reactions have been set
up between its organs and the surrounding objects.
On these affinities and reactions sense and in
tellect are grafted. The plants are of different
nature, yet growing together they bear excellent
fruit. It is as the organs receive appropriate
stimulations that attention is riveted on definite
sensations. It is as the system exercises its
^ natural activities that passion, will, and medita
tion possess the mind. No syllogism is needed to
/persuade us to eat, no prophecy of happiness to
\Jteach us to love. On the contrary, the living
organism, caught in the act, informs us how to
reason and what to enjoy. The soul adopts the
body s aims; from the body and from its instincts
she draws a first hint of the right means to those
accepted purposes. Thus reason enters into part
nership with the world and begins to be respected
I there; which it would never be if it were not ex-
| pressive of the same mechanical forces that are to
! preside over events and render them fortunate or
| unfortunate for human interests. /Season is sig
nificant in action only because it has begun by
taking, so to speak, the body s side; that sympa
thetic bias enables her to distinguish events per
tinent to the chosen interests, to compare im-

FIRST STEPS 63

pulse with satisfaction, and, by representing a new
and circular current in the system, to preside over
the formation of better habits, habits expressing
more instincts at once and responding to more
opportunities.

CHAPTER III

THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS

At. first sight it might seem an idle

Nature

man s observation that the first task of intel

ligence is to represent the environing
reality; a reality actually represented in the notion,
universally prevalent among men, of a cosmos in
space and time, an animated material engine
called nature. In trying to conceive nature the
mind lisps its first lesson; natural phenomena are
the mother tongue of imagination no less than
of science and practical life. Men and gods are
not conceivable otherwise than as inhabitants
of nature. Early experience knows no mystery
which is not somehow rooted in transformations
of the natural world, and fancy can build no hope
which would not be expressible there. But we are
grown so accustomed to this ancient apparition
that we may be no longer aware how difficult was
the task of conjuring it up. We may even have
forgotten the possibility that such a vision should
never have arisen at all. A brief excursion into
that much abused subject, the psychology of per
ception, may here serve to remind us of the great

DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 65

work which the budding intellect must long ago
have accomplished unawares.

Consider how the shocks out of

Difficulties

in conceiv- which the notion of material things is

ing nature. t() be built firgt ^^ ^ QmQ int() the

soul. Eye and hand, if we may neglect the other
senses, transmit their successive impressions, all
varying with the position of outer objects and with
the other material conditions. A chaos of multi
tudinous impressions rains in from all sides at all
hours. Nor have the external or cognitive senses
an original primacy. The taste, the smell, the
alarming sounds of things are continually distract
ing attention. There are infinite reverberations in
memory of all former impressions, together with
fresh fancies created in the brain, things at first in
no wise subordinated to external objects. All these
incongruous elements are mingled like a witches
brew. And more : there are indications that inner
sensations, such as those of digestion, have an
overpowering influence on the primitive mind,
which has not learned to articulate or distinguish
permanent needs. So that to the whirl of outer
sensations we must add, to reach some notion of
what consciousness may contain before the advent
of reason, interruptions and lethargies caused by
wholly blind internal feelings ; trances such as fall
even on comparatively articulate minds in rage,
lust, or madness. Against all these bewildering
forces the new-born reason has to struggle ; and we
need not wonder that the costly experiments and
VOL. I. 5

66 THE LIFE OF REASON

disillusions of the past have not yet produced a
complete enlightenment.

Transcen ^ ne ons l au g n ^ made in the last cen-

dentai tury by the transcendental philosophy

qualms. upon empirical traditions is familiar

to everybody : it seemed a pertinent attack, yet in
the end proved quite trifling and unavailing.
Thought,, we are told rightly enough, cannot be
accounted for by enumerating its conditions. A
number of detached sensations, being each its
own little world, cannot add themselves together
nor conjoin themselves in the void. Again, ex
periences having an alleged common cause would
not have, merely for that reason, a common object.
Nor would a series of successive perceptions, no
matter how quick, logically involve a sense of time
nor a notion of succession. Yet, in point of fact,
when such a succession occurs and a living brain is
there to acquire some structural modification by
virtue of its own passing states, a memory of that
succession and its terms may often supervene. It
is quite true also that the simultaneous presence
or association of images belonging to different
senses does not carry with it by intrinsic necessity
any fusion of such images nor any notion of an
object having them for its qualities. Yet, in
point of fact, such a group of sensations does
often merge into a complex image; instead of the
elements originally perceptible in isolation, there
arises a familiar term, a sort of personal presence.
To this felt presence, certain instinctive reactions

DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 67

are attached, and the sensations that may be in
volved in that apparition, when each for any rea
son becomes emphatic, are referred to it as its
qualities or its effects.

Such complications of course involve the gift of
memory, with capacity to survey at once vestiges
of many perceptions, to feel their implication
and absorption in the present object, and to be
carried, by this sense of relation, to the thought
that those perceptions have a representative
function. And this is a great step. It mani
fests the mind s powers. It illustrates those
transformations of consciousness the principle of
which, when abstracted, we call intelligence. We
must accordingly proceed with caution, for we are
digging at the very roots of reason.
Thought an The chief perplexity, however, which
aspect of besets this subject and makes discus-

hfe and

transitive. sions of it so often end in a cloud, is
quite artificial. Thought is not a mechanical cal
culus, where the elements and the method exhaust
the fact. Thought is a form of life, and should
be conceived on the analogy of nutrition, genera
tion, and art. Reason, as Hume said with pro
found truth, is an unintelligible instinct. It could
not be otherwise if reason is to remain something
transitive and existential; for transition is unin
telligible, and yet is the deepest characteristic of
existence. Philosophers, however, having per
ceived that the function of thought is to fix static
terms and reveal eternal relations, have inadver-

A

68 THE LIFE OF EEASON

tently transferred to the living act what is true
only of its ideal object; and they have expected
to find in the process,, treated psychologically, that
luminous deductive clearness which belongs to the
ideal world it tends to reveal. The intelligible,
however, lies at the periphery of experience, the
j surd at its core ; and intelligence is but one centrif- ,
ugal ray darting from the slime to the stars.)
Thought must execute a metamorphosis; and
while this is of course mysterious, it is one of those
familiar mysteries, like motion and will, which
are more natural than dialectical lucidity itself;
for dialectic grows cogent by fulfilling intent, but
intent or meaning is itself vital and inexplicable.
Perception The process of counting is perhaps

as simple an instance as can be found

uve and syn
thetic, of a mental operation on sensible data.

The clock, let us say, strikes two : if the sensorium
were perfectly elastic and after receiving the first
tlow reverted exactly to its previous state, retain
ing absolutely no trace of that momentary oscil
lation and no altered habit, then it is certain that
a sense for number or a faculty of counting could
never arise. The second stroke would be re
sponded to with the same reaction which had met
the first. There would be no summation of effects,
no complication. However numerous the succes
sive impressions might come to be, each would
remain fresh and pure, the last being identical in
character with the first. One, one, one, would be
the monotonous response for ever. Just so gen-

DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 69

erations of ephemeral insects that succeeded one
another without transmitting experience might
repeat the same round of impressions an ever
lasting progression without a shadow of progress.
Such, too, is the idiot s life: his liquid brain
transmits every impulse without resistance and
retains the record of no impression.

Intelligence is accordingly conditioned by a
modification of both structure and consciousness
by dint of past events. To be aware that a
second stroke is not itself the first, I must retain
something of the old sensation. The first must
reverberate still in my ears when the second ar
rives, so that this second, coming into a conscious
ness still filled by the first, is a different experi
ence from the first, which fell into a mind
perfectly empty and unprepared. Now the new
comer finds in the subsisting One a sponsor to
christen it by the name of Two. The first stroke
was a simple 1. The second is not simply another
1, a mere iteration of the first. It is I 1 , where
the coefficient represents the reverberating first
stroke, still persisting in the mind, and forming a
background and perspective against which the new
stroke may be distinguished. The meaning of
" two," then, is " this after that " or " this again/
where we have a simultaneous sense of two things
which have been separately perceived but are iden
tified as similar in their nature. Eepetition must
cease to be pure repetition and become cumulative
before it can give rise to the consciousness of
repetition.

70 THE LIFE OF REASON

The first condition of counting, then, is that
the sensorium should retain something of the first
impression while it receives the second, or (to
state the corresponding mental fact) that the sec
ond sensation should be felt together with a sur
vival of the first from which it is distinguished in
point of existence and with which it is identified
in point of character.

Now, to secure this, it is not enough
NO identical that the gen^ri^ should be mate-

agent needed.

rially continuous, or that a " spiritual
substance " or a " transcendental ego " should per
sist in time to receive the second sensation after
having received and registered the first. A per
fectly elastic sensorium, a wholly unchanging soul,
or a quite absolute ego might remain perfectly
identical with itself through various experiences
without collating them. It would then remain,
in fact, more truly and literally identical than if
it were modified somewhat by those successive
shocks. Yet a sensorium or a spirit thus un
changed would be incapable of memory, unfit to
connect a past perception with one present or to
become aware of their relation. It is not identity
in the substance impressed, but growing compli
cation in the phenomenon presented, that makes
possible a sense of diversity and relation between
things. The identity of substance or spirit, if it
were absolute, would indeed prevent comparison,
because it would exclude modifications, and it is
the survival of past modifications within the pres-

DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 71

ent that makes comparisons possible. We may
impress any number of forms successively on the
same water, and the identity of the substance will
not help those forms to survive and accumulate
their effects. But if we have a surface that retains
our successive stampings we may change the sub
stance from wax to plaster and from plaster to
bronze, and the effects of our labour will survive
and be superimposed upon one another. It is the
actual plastic form in both mind and body, not
any unchanging substance or agent, that is effi
cacious in perpetuating thought and gathering
experience.

Were not Nature and all her parts such models
of patience and pertinacity, they never would have
succeeded in impressing their existence on some
thing so volatile and irresponsible as thought is.
Example of A sensation needs to be violent, like
the sun. the sun s blinding light, to arrest at
tention, and keep it taut, as it were, long enough
for the system to acquire a respectful attitude, and
grow predisposed to resume it. A repetition of
that sensation will thereafter meet with a pre
pared response which we call recognition ; the con
comitants of the old experience will form them
selves afresh about the new one and by their
convergence give it a sort of welcome and inter
pretation. The movement, for instance, by which
the face was raised toward the heavens was perhaps
one element which added to the first sensation,
brightness, a concomitant sensation, height; the

72 THE LIFE OF REASON

brightness was not bright merely, but high. Now
when the brightness reappears the face will more
quickly be lifted up; the place where the bright
ness shone will be looked for; the brightness will
have acquired a claim to be placed somewhere.
The heat which at the same moment may have
burned the forehead will also be expected and,
when felt, projected into the brightness, which will
now be hot as well as high. So with whatever
other sensations time may associate with this
group. They will all adhere to the original im
pression, enriching it with an individuality which
will render it before long a familiar complex in
experience, and one easy to recognise and to com
plete in idea.

In the case of so vivid a thing as
HIS pnm- ^ e sun > s brightness many other sensa-

itive divinity.

tions beside those out of which science
draws the qualities attributed to that heavenly
body adhere in the primitive mind to the phenom
enon. Before he is a substance the sun is a god.
He is beneficent and necessary no less than bright
and high; he rises upon all happy opportunities
and sets upon all terrors. He is divine, since all
life and fruitfulness hang upon his miraculous
revolutions. His coming and going are life and
death to the world. As the sensations of light and
heat are projected upward together to become
attributes of his body, so the feelings of pleasure,
safety, and tope which he brings into the soul are
projected into his spirit; and to this spirit, more

DISCOVEKY OF NATUEAL OBJECTS 73

than to anything else, energy, independence, and
substantiality are originally attributed. The
emotions felt in his presence being the ultimate
issue and term of his effect in us, the counterpart
or shadow of those emotions is regarded as the
first and deepest factor in his causality. It is his
divine life, more than aught else, that underlies
his apparitions and explains the influences which
he propagates. The substance or independent ex
istence attributed to objects is therefore by no
means only or primarily a physical notion. What
is conceived to support the physical qualities is a
pseudo-psychic or vital force. It is a moral and
living object that we construct, building it up out
of all the materials, emotional, intellectual, and
sensuous, which lie at hand in our consciousness
to be synthesised into the hybrid reality which we
are to fancy confronting us. To discriminate and
redistribute those miscellaneous physical and psy
chical elements, and to divorce the god from the
material sun, is a much later problem, arising at
a different and more reflective stage in the Life
of Reason.

causes and When reflection, turning to the corn-
essences prehension of a chaotic experience,
contrasted. busies itself about recurrences, when it
seeks to normalise in some way things coming and
going, and to straighten out the causes of events,
that reflection is inevitably turned toward some
thing dynamic and independent, and can have no
successful issue except in mechanical science.

74 THE LIFE OF REASON

When on the other hand reflection stops to chal
lenge and question the fleeting object, not so much
to prepare for its possible return as to conceive its
present nature, this reflection is turned no less
unmistakably in the direction of ideas, and will
terminate in logic or the morphology of being.
We attribute independence to things in order to
normalise their recurrence. We attribute essences
to them in order to normalise their manifesta
tions or constitution. Independence will ulti
mately turn out to be an assumed constancy in
material processes, essence an assumed constancy
in ideal meanings or points of reference in dis
course. The one marks the systematic distribution
of objects, the other their settled character.
Voracity of We talk of recurrent perceptions, but

intellect. materially considered no perception
recurs. Each recurrence is one of a finite series
and holds for ever its place and number in that
series. Yet human attention, while it can survey
several simultaneous impressions and find them
similar, cannot keep them distinct if they grow
too numerous. The mind has a native bias and
inveterate preference for form and identification.
Water does not run down hill more persistently
than attention turns experience into constant
terms. The several repetitions of one essence
given in consciousness will tend at once to be neg
lected, and only the essence itself the character
shared by those sundry perceptions will stand
and become a term in mental discourse. After

DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 75

a few strokes of the clock,, the reiterated impres
sions merge and cover one another; we lose count
and perceive the quality and rhythm but not the
number of the sounds. If this is true of so
abstract and mathematical a perception as is count
ing, how emphatically true must it be of con
tinuous and infinitely varied perceptions flowing
in from the whole spatial world. Glimpses of the
environment follow one another in quick succes
sion, like a regiment of soldiers in uniform; only
now and then does the stream take a new turn,
catch a new ray of sunlight, or arrest our atten
tion at some break.

The senses in their natural play revert con
stantly to familiar objects, gaining impressions
which differ but slightly from one another. These
slight differences are submerged in apperception,
so that sensation comes to be not so much an addi
tion of new items to consciousness as a reburnish-
ing there of some imbedded device. Its character
and relations are only slightly modified at each
fresh rejuvenation.) To catch the passing phe
nomenon in all ifs novelty and idiosyncrasy is a
work of artifice and curiosity. Such an exercise
does violence to intellectual instinct and involves
an aesthetic power of diving bodily into the stream
of sensation, having thrown overboard all rational
ballast and escaped at once the inertia and the
momentum of practical life. Normally every
datum of sense is at once devoured by a hungry
intellect and digested for the sake of its vital

76 THE LIFE OF REASON

juices. The result is that what ordinarily re
mains in memory is no representative of particu
lar moments or shocks though sensation,, as in
dreams, may be incidentally recreated from within
but rather a logical possession, a sense of ac^
quaintance with a certain field of reality, in a
word, a consciousness of knowledge.

But what, we may ask, is this real-
Can the J

transcendent ity, which we boast to know ? May not
be known? the scept i c j ust i y con tend that nothing

is so unknown and indeed unknowable as this pre
tended object of knowledge? The sensations
which reason treats so cavalierly were at least
something actual while they lasted and made good
their momentary claim to our interest; but what
;. ,.is this new ideal figment, unseizable yet ever
present, invisible but indispensable, unknowable
yet alone interesting or important ? Strange that
the only possible object or theme of our knowledge
should be something we cannot know.

An answer to these doubts will per
t/an the im- A

mediate be haps appear if we ask ourselves what
meant? gort Q f con t ac t w ith reality would sat

isfy us, and in what terms we expect or desire to
possess the subject-matter of our thoughts. Is it
simply corroboration that we look forj Is it a
verification of truth in sense? It would be un
reasonable, in that case, after all the evidencejve
demand has been gathered, to complain that the
ideal term thus concurrently suggested, the super
sensible substance, reality, or independent object,

DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 77

does not itself descend into the arena of immediate
sensuous presentation. Knowledge is not eating,
and we cannot expect to devour and possess what
we mean. Knowledge is recognition of some
thing absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
It is an advance on sensation precisely because it
is representative. The terms or goals of thought
have for their function to subtend long tracts of
sensuous experience, to be ideal links between fact
and fact, invisible wires behind the scenes, threads
along which inference may run in making phe
nomena intelligible and controllable. An idea
that should become an image would cease to be
idea}; a principle. that is to remain a principle can
never-become a fact. A God that you could see
with the eyes of the body, a heaven you might
climb into by a ladder planted at Bethel, would
be parts of this created and interpretable world,
not terms in its interpretation nor objects in a
spiritual sphere./ Now external objects are
thought to be principles and sources of experi
ence; they are accordingly conceived realities on
an ideal plane. We may look for all the evidence
we cHoose before we declare our inference to be
warranted; but we must not ask for something
more than evidence, nor expect to know realities
without inferring them anew. They are revealed
only to understanding. We cannot cease to think
and still continue to know.

It may be said, however, that principles and
external objects are interesting only because they

78 THE LIFE OF REASON

symbolise further sensations, that thought is an
expedient of finite minds, and that representation
is thought a is a ghostly process which we crave
bridge from to ma t er ialise into bodily possession.

sensation to J

sensation? We may grow sick of inferring truth
and long rather to become reality. Intelligence
is after all no compulsory possession; and while
some of us would gladly have more of it, others
find that they already have too much. The ten
sion of thought distresses them and to represent
what they cannot and would not be is not a
natural function of their spirit. To such minds
experience that should merely corroborate ideas
would prolong dissatisfaction. The ideas must be
realised ; they must pass into immediacy. If real
ity (a word employed generally in a eulogistic
sense) is to mean this desired immediacy, no ideal
of thought can be real. All intelligible objects
and the whole universe of mental discourse would
then be an unreal and conventional structure, im
pinging ultimately on sense from which it would
derive its sole validity.

There would be no need of quarrelling with
such a philosophy, were not its use of words rather
misleading. Call experience in its existential and
immediate aspect, if you will, the sole reality ; that
will not prevent reality from having an ideal
dimension. The intellectual world will continue
to give beauty, meaning, and scope to those bub
bles of consciousness on which it is painted. Eeal-
ity would not be,, in that case, what thought aspires

DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 79

to reach. Consciousness is the least ideal of things
when reason is taken out of it. Keality would then
need thought to give it all those human values of
which, in its substance, it would have been wholly
deprived; and the ideal would still be what lent
music to throbs and significance to being.

The equivocation favoured by such language at
once begins to appear. Is not thought with all
its products a part of experience? Must not
sense, if it be the only reality, be sentient some
times of the ideal ? What the site is to a city that is
immediate experience to the universe of discourse.
The latter is all held materially within the lim
its defined by the former; but if immediate ex
perience be the seat of the moral world, the moral
world is the only interesting possession of imme
diate experience. When a waste is built on, how
ever, it is a violent paradox to call it still a waste ;
and an immediate experience that represents the
rest of sentience, with all manner of ideal har
monies read into the whole in the act of repre
senting it, is an immediate experience raised to
its highest power: it is the Life of Eeason. In
Meng vain, then, will n philosophy of intel-

naturaiiter lectual abstention limit so Platonic a
piatonica. term ag rea ^y to the immediate aspect
of existence, when it is the ideal aspect that en
dows existence with character and value, together
with representative scope and a certain lien upon
eternity.

More legitimate, therefore, would be the asser-

80 THE LIFE OF REASON

tion that knowledge reaches reality when it touches
its ideal goal. Eeality is known when, as in
mathematics, a stable and unequivocal object is
developed by thinking. The locus or material
embodiment of such a reality is no longer in view ;
these questions seem to the logician irrelevant. If
necessary ideas find no illustration in sense, he
deems the fact an argument against the impor
tance and validity of sensation, not in the least a
disproof of his ideal knowledge. If no site be
found on earth for the Platonic city, its consti
tution is none the less recorded and enshrined in
heaven; nor is that the only true ideal that has
not where to lay its head. What in the sensualis-
tic or mystical system was called reality will now
be termed appearance, and what there figured as
an imaginary construction borne by the conscious
moment will now appear to be a prototype for all
existence and an eternal standard for its estima
tion.

It is this rationalistic or Platonic system (lit
tle as most men may suspect the fact) that finds
a first expression in ordinary perception. When
you distinguish your sensations from their cause
and laugh at the idealist (as this kind of sceptic
is called) who says that chairs and tables exist
only in your mind, you are treating a figment of
reason as a deeper and truer thing than the
moments of life whose blind experience that reason
has come to illumine. What you call the evidence
of sense is pure confidence in reason. You will

DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 81

not be so idiotic as to make no inferences from
your sensations; you will not pin your faith so
unimaginatively on momentary appearance as to
deny that the world exists when you stop thinking
about it. You feel that your intellect has wider
scope and has discovered many a thing that goes
on behind the scenes, many a secret that would
escape a stupid and gaping observation. It is the
fool that looks to look and stops at the barely
visible : you not only look but see; for you under
stand.

identity and Now the practical burden of such
^redkTttrof understanding, if y OU take the trouble
things. to analyse it, will turn out to be what

the sceptic says it is: assurance of eventual sen
sations. But as these sensations, in memory and
expectation, are numerous and indefinitely vari
able, you are not able to hold them clearly before
the mind ; indeed, the realisation of all the poten
tialities which you vaguely feel to lie in the future
is a task absolutely beyond imagination. Yet
your present impressions, dependent as they are
on your chance attitude and disposition and on a
thousand trivial accidents, are far from repre
senting adequately all that might be discovered
or that is actually known about the object before
you. This object, then, to your apprehension, is
not identical with any of the sensations that re
veal it, nor is it exhausted by all these sensations
when they are added together; yet it contains
nothing assignable but what they might conceiv-

VOL. L 6

82 THE LIFE OF REASON

ably reveal. As it lies in your fancy, then, this
object, the reality, is a complex and elusive entity,
the sum at once and the residuum of all particu
lar impressions which, underlying the present one,
have bequeathed to it their surviving linkage in
discourse and consequently endowed it with a
large part of its present character. With this
hybrid object, sensuous in its materials and ideal
in its locus, each particular glimpse is compared,
and is recognised to be but a glimpse, an aspect
which the object presents to a particular observer.
Here are two identifications. In the first place
various sensations and felt relations, which can
not be kept distinct in the mind, fall together into
one term of discourse, represented by a sign, a
word, or a more or less complete sensuous image.
In the second place the new perception is referred
to that ideal entity of which it is now called a
manifestation and effect.

Such are the primary relations of reality and
I appearance. A reality is a term of discourse based
" on a psychic complex of memories, associations,
and expectations, but constituted in its ideal in
dependence by the assertive energy of thought.
An appearance is a passing sensation, recognised
as belonging to that group of which the object
itself is the ideal representative, and accordingly
regarded as a manifestation of that object.

Thus the notion of an independent and per
manent world is an ideal term used to mark and
as it were to justify the cohesion in space and the

DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 83

recurrence in time of recognisable groups of sen
sations. This coherence and recurrence force the
intellect, if it would master experience at all or
understand anything, to frame the idea of such a
reality. If we wish to defend the use of such an
idea and prove to ourselves its necessity, all we
need do is to point to that coherence and recur
rence in external phenomena. That brave effort
and flight of intelligence which in the beginning
raised man to the conception of reality, enabling
him to discount and interpret appearance, will, if
we retain our trust in reason, raise us continually
anew to that same idea, by a no less spontaneous
and victorious movement of thought.

CHAPTER IV

ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY

Psychology The English psychologists who first
as a solvent, disintegrated the idea of substance,
and whose traces we have in general followed in
the above account, did not study the question
wholly for its own sake or in the spirit of a science
that aims at nothing but a historical analysis of
mind. They had a more or less malicious pur
pose behind their psychology. They thought that
if they could once show how metaphysical ideas
are made they would discredit those ideas and
banish them for ever from the world. If they
retained confidence in any notion as Hobbes in
body, Locke in matter and in God, Berkeley in
spirits, and Kant, the inheritor of this malicious
psychology, in the thing-in-itself and in heaven-
it was merely by inadvertence or want of courage.
The principle of their reasoning, where they chose
to apply it, was always this, that ideas whose
materials could all be accounted for in conscious
ness and referred to sense or to the operations of
mind were thereby exhausted and deprived of fur
ther validity. Only the unaccountable, or rather
the uncriticised, could be true. Consequently the

84

ON SOME CRITICS 85

advance of psychology meant, in this school, the
retreat of reason; for as one notion after another
was clarified and reduced to its elements it was
ipso facto deprived of its function.

So far were these philosophers from conceiving
that validity and truth are ideal relations, accruing
to ideas by virtue of dialectic and use, that while on
the one hand they pointed out vital affinities and
pragmatic sanctions in the mind s economy they
confessed on the other that the outcome of their
philosophy was sceptical; for no idea could be
found in the mind which was not a phenomenon
there, and no inference could be drawn from these
phenomena not based on some inherent "tendency
to feign." The analysis which was in truth legiti
mising and purifying knowledge seemed to them
absolutely to blast it, and the closer they came to
the bed-rock of experience the more incapable they
felt of building up anything upon it. Self-
knowledge meant, they fancied, self-detection ; the
representative value of thought decreased as
thought grew in scope and elaboration. It became
impossible to be at once quite serious and quite
intelligent; for to use reason was to indulge in
subjective fiction, while conscientiously to abstain
from using it was to sink back upon inarticulate
and brutish instinct.

In Hume this sophistication was frankly
avowed. Philosophy discredited itself; but a man
of parts, who loved intellectual games even better
than backgammon, might take a hand with the

86 THE LIFE OF KEASON

wits and historians of his day, until the clock
struck twelve and the party was over. Even
in Kant, though the mood was more cramped and
earnest, the mystical sophistication was quite the
same. Kant, too, imagined that the bottom had
been knocked out of the world ; that in comparison
with some unutterable sort of truth empirical
truth was falsehood, and that validity for all pos
sible experience was weak validity, in comparison
with validity of some other and unmentionable
sort. Since space and time could not repel the
accusation of being the necessary forms of percep
tion, space and time were not to be much thought
of; and when the sad truth was disclosed that
causality and the categories were instruments by
which the idea of nature had to be constructed, if
such an idea was to exist at all, then nature and
causality shrivelled up and were dishonoured
together; so that, the soul s occupation being
gone, she must needs appeal to some mysterious
oracle, some abstract and irrelevant omen within
the breast, and muster up all the stern courage
of an accepted despair to carry her through this
world of mathematical illusion into some green
and infantile paradise beyond.

What idea, we mar well ask our-

Misconceived

role of intern- selves, did these modern philosophers
gence. entertain regarding the pretensions of

ancient and mediaeval metaphysics ? What under
standing had they of the spirit in which the
natural organs of reason had been exercised and

ON SOME CEITICS 87

developed in those schools? Frankly, very little;
for they accepted from ancient philosophy and
from common-sense the distinction between reality
and appearance, but they forgot the function of
that distinction and dislocated its meaning, which
was nothing but to translate the chaos of percep
tion into the regular play of stable natures and
objects congenial to discursive thought and valid
in the art of living. Philosophy had been the
natural science of perception raised to the reflec
tive plane, the objects maintaining themselves on
this higher plane being styled realities, and those
still floundering below it being called appearances
or mere ideas. The function of envisaging real
ity, ever since Parmenides and Heraclitus, had
been universally attributed to the intellect. When
the moderns, therefore, proved anew that it was the
mind that framed that idea, and that what we call
reality, substance, nature, or God, can be reached
only by an operation of reason, they made no very
novel or damaging discovery.

Of course, it is possible to disregard the sugges
tions of reason in any particular case and it is quite
possible to believe, for instance, that the hypothesis
of an external material world is an erroneous one.
But that this hypothesis is erroneous does not fol
low from the fact that it is a hypothesis. To discard
it on that ground would be to discard all reasoned
knowledge and to deny altogether the validity of
thought. If intelligence is assumed to be an or
gan of cognition and a vehicle for truth, a given

88 THE LIFE OF REASON

hypothesis about the causes of perception can only
be discarded when a better hypothesis on the same
subject has been supplied. To be better such a
hypothesis would have to meet the multiplicity of
phenomena and their mutations with a more intel
ligible scheme of comprehension and a more useful
instrument of control.

AII criticism Scepticism is always possible while
dogmatic. it is partial. It will remain the privi
lege and resource of a free mind that has elas
ticity enough to disintegrate its own formations
and to approach its experience from a variety of
sides and with more than a single method. But
the method chosen must be coherent in itself and
the point of view assumed must be adhered to
during that survey; so that whatever reconstruc
tion the novel view may produce in science will
be science still, and will involve assumptions and
dogmas which must challenge comparison with
the dogmas and assumptions they would supplant.
People speak of dogmatism as if it were a method
to be altogether outgrown and something for which
some non-assertive philosophy could furnish a sub
stitute. But dogmatism is merely a matter of
degree. Some thinkers and some systems retreat
further than others into the stratum beneath cur
rent conventions and make us more conscious of
the complex machinery which, working silently in
the soul, makes possible all the rapid and facile
operations of reason. The deeper this retrospec
tive glance the less dogmatic the philosophy. A

ON SOME CKITICS 89

primordial constitution or tendency, however, must
always remain, having structure and involving a
definite life; for if we thought to reach some
wholly vacant and indeterminate point of origin,
we should have reached something wholly impotent
and indifferent, a blank pregnant with nothing
that we wished to explain or that actual experi
ence presented. When, starting with the inevi
table preformation and constitutional bias, we
sought to build up a simpler and nobler edifice of
thought, to be a palace and fortress rather than a
prison for experience, our critical philosophy
would still be dogmatic, since it would be built
upon inexplicable but actual data by a process of
inference underived but inevitable.
A choke of No doubt Aristotle and the scholas-
hypotheses. tics were often uncritical. They were
too intent on building up and buttressing their
system on the broad human or religious founda
tions which they had chosen for it. They nursed
the comfortable conviction that whatever their
thought contained was eternal and objective truth,
a copy of the divine intellect or of the world s intel
ligible structure. A sceptic may easily deride that
confidence of theirs; their system may have been
their system and nothing more. But the way to
proceed if we wish to turn our shrewd suspicions
and our sense of insecurity into an articulate con
viction and to prove that they erred, is to build
another system, a more modest one, perhaps, which
will grow more spontaneously and inevitably in

90 THE LIFE OF REASON

the mind out of the data of experience. Obviously
the rival and critical theory will make the same
tacit claim as the other to absolute validity. If
all our ideas and perceptions conspire to reinforce
the new hypothesis, this will become inevitable
and necessary to us. We shall then condemn the
other hypothesis, not indeed for having been a
hypothesis, which is the common fate of all
rational and interpretative thought, but for having
been a hypothesis artificial, misleading, and false;
one not following necessarily nor intelligibly out
of the facts, nor leading to a satisfactory reaction
upon them, either in contemplation or in practice.
. Now this is in truth exactly the con-

guised enthu- viction which those malicious psycholo
gists secretly harboured. Their critical
scruples and transcendental qualms covered a
robust rebellion against being fooled by authority.
They rose to abate abuses among which, as
Hobbes said, "the frequency of insignificant speech
is one." Their psychology was not merely a
cathartic, but a gospel. Their young criticism was
sent into the world to make straight the path of
a new positivism, as now, in its old age, it is in
voked to keep open the door to superstition. Some
of those reformers, like Hobbes and Locke, had at
heart the interests of a physical and political
mechanism, which they wished to substitute for
the cumbrous and irritating constraints of tradi
tion. Their criticism stopped at the frontiers of
their practical discontent; they did not care to ask

ON SOME CKITICS 91

how the belief in matter, space, motion, God, or
whatever else still retained their allegiance, could
withstand the kind of psychology which, as they
conceived, had done away with individual essences
and nominal powers. Berkeley, whose interests
lay in a different quarter, used the same critical
method in support of a different dogmatism;
armed with the traditional pietistic theory of
Providence he undertook with a light heart to
demolish the whole edifice which reason and sci
ence had built upon spatial perception. He
wished the lay intellect to revert to a pious idiocy
in the presence of Nature, lest consideration of her
history and laws should breed " mathematical
atheists " ; and the outer world being thus reduced
to a sensuous dream and to the blur of immediate
feeling, intelligence and practical faith would be
more unremittingly employed upon Christian
mythology. Men would be bound to it by a neces
sary allegiance, there being no longer any rival
object left for serious or intelligent consideration.
The psychological analysis on which these par
tial or total negations were founded was in a gen
eral way admirable ; the necessary artifices to which
it had recourse in distinguishing simple and com
plex ideas, principles of association and inference,
were nothing but premonitions of what a physio
logical psychology would do in referring the men
tal process to its organic and external supports;
for experience has no other divisions than those
it creates in itself by distinguishing its objects

92 THE LIFE OF EEASON

and its organs. Keference to external conditions,
though seldom explicit in these writers, who
imagined they could appeal to an introspection
not revealing the external world, was pervasive in
them ; as, for instance, where Hume made his fun
damental distinction between impressions and
ideas, where the discrimination was based nomi
nally on relative vividness and priority in time, but
really on causation respectively by outer objects or
by spontaneous processes in the brain.

Hume it was who carried this psy-

Hume s ...

gratuitous chological analysis to its goal, giving it
scepticism. g rea ter simplicity and universal scope ;
and he had also the further advantage of not
nursing any metaphysical changeling of his own
to substitute for the legitimate offspring of human
understanding. His curiosity was purer and his
scepticism more impartial, so that he laid bare the
natural habits and necessary fictions of thought
with singular lucidity, and sufficient accuracy for
general purposes. But the malice of a psychology
intended as a weapon against superstition here
recoils on science itself. Hume, like Berkeley,
was extremely young, scarce five-and-twenty, when
he wrote his most incisive work ; he was not ready
to propose in theory that test of ideas by their
utility which in practice he and the whole English
school have instinctively adopted. An ulterior
test of validity would not have seemed to him sat
isfactory, for though inclined to rebellion and
positivism he was still the pupil of that mythical

ON SOME CKITICS 93

philosophy which attributed the value of things
to their origin rather than to their uses, because
it had first, in its parabolic way, erected the high
est good into a First Cause. Still breathing, in
spite of himself, this atmosphere of materialised
Platonism, Hume could not discover the true
origin of anything without imagining that he had
destroyed its value. A natural child meant for
him an illegitimate one; his philosophy had not
yet reached the wisdom of that French lady who
asked if all children were not natural. The outcome
of his psychology and criticism seemed accord
ingly to be an inhibition of reason; he was left
free to choose between the distractions of back
gammon and " sitting down in a forlorn scepti
cism."

In his first youth, while disintegrating reflec
tion still overpowered the active interests of his
mind, Hume seems to have had some moments of
genuine suspense and doubt: but with years and
prosperity the normal habits of inference which
he had so acutely analysed asserted themselves
in his own person and he yielded to the " tendency
to feign " so far at least as to believe languidly in
the histories he wrote, the compliments he re
ceived, and the succulent dinners he devoured.
There is a kind of courtesy in scepticism. It ,
would be an offence against polite conventions to /
press our doubts too far and question the per
manence of our estates, our neighbours independ
ent, existence, or even the justification of a good

94 THE LIFE OF REASON

bishop s faith and income. Against metaphysi
cians, and even against bishops, sarcasm was not
without its savour; but the line must be drawn
somewhere by a gentleman and a man of the
world. Hume found no obstacle in his specula
tions to the adoption of all necessary and useful
conceptions in the sphere to which he limited his
mature interests. That he never extended this
liberty to believe into more speculative and com
prehensive regions was due simply to a voluntary
superficiality in his thought. Had he been inter
ested in the rationality of things he would have
laboured to discover it, as he laboured to discover
that historical truth or that political utility to
which his interests happened to attach.
Kant s substi- Kant, li ke Berkeley, had a private
tutefor mysticism in reserve to raise upon the

knowledge. ru i ns O f sc i e nce and common-sense.
Knowledge was to be removed to make way for
faith. This task is ambiguous, and the equivoca
tion involved in it is perhaps the deepest of those
confusions with which German metaphysics has
since struggled, and which have made it waver
between the deepest introspection and the dreari
est mythology. To substitute faith for knowl
edge might mean to teach the intellect humility,
to make it aware of its theoretic and transitive
function as a faculty for hypothesis and rational
fiction, building a bridge of methodical inferences
and ideal unities between fact and fact, between
endeavour and satisfaction. It might be to remind

ON SOME CKITICS 95

us, sprinkling over us, as it were, the Lenten
ashes of an intellectual contrition, that our
thoughts are air even as our bodies are dust,
momentary vehicles and products of an immortal
vitality in God and in nature, which fosters and
illumines us for a moment before it lapses into
other forms.

Had Kant proposed to humble and concen
trate into a practical faith the same natural ideas
which had previously been taken for absolute
knowledge, his intention would have been inno
cent, his conclusions wise, and his analysis free
from venom and arriere-pensee. Man, because of
his finite and propulsive nature and because he is
a pilgrim and a traveller throughout his life, is
obliged to have faith : the absent, the hidden, the
eventual, is the necessary object of his concern.
But what else shall his faith rest in except in
what the necessary forms of his perception present
to him and what the indispensable categories of
his understanding help him to conceive? What
possible objects are there for faith except objects
of a possible experience? What else should a
practical and moral philosophy concern itself
with, except the governance and betterment of the
real world ? It is surely by using his only possible
forms of perception and his inevitable categories
of understanding that man may yet learn, as he
has partly learned already, to live and prosper in
the universe. Had Kant s criticism amounted
simply to such a confession of the tentative, prac
tical, and hypothetical nature of human reason,

96 THE LIFE OF REASON

it would have been wholly acceptable to the wise ;
and its appeal to faith would have been nothing
but an expression of natural vitality and courage,
just as its criticism of knowledge would have been
nothing but a better acquaintance with self. This
faith would have called the forces of impulse and
passion to reason s support, not to its betrayal.
Faith would have meant faith in the intellect, a
faith naturally expressing man s practical and
ideal nature, and the only faith yet sanctioned by
its fruits.

False Side by side with this reinstatement

s ~ bi -l ct ! v i ty f reason, however, which was not

attributed

to reason. absent f rom Kant s system in its criti
cal phase and in its application to science, there
lurked in his substitution of faith for knowledge
another and sinister intention. He wished to
blast as insignificant, because " subjective," the
whole structure of human intelligence, with all the
lessons of experience and all the triumphs of
human skill, and to attach absolute validity
instead to certain echoes of his rigoristic religious
education. These notions were surely just as sub
jective, and far more local and transitory, than the
common machinery of thought ; and it was actually
proclaimed to be an evidence of their sublimity
that they remained entirely without practical sanc
tion in the form of success or of happiness. The
1 " categorical imperative " was a shadow of the ten
commandments; the postulates of practical reason
were the minimal tenets of the most abstract

ON SOME CRITICS 97

Protestantism. These fossils, found unaccount
ably imbedded in the old man s mind, he regarded
as the evidences of an inward but supernatural
revelation.

chimerical re- Only the quaint severity of Kant s
construction, education and character can make in
telligible to us the restraint he exercised in mak
ing supernatural postulates. All he asserted was
his inscrutable moral imperative and a God to re
ward with the pleasures of the next world those
who had been Puritans in this. But the same
principle could obviously be applied to other cher
ished imaginations : there is no superstition which
it might not justify in the eyes of men accus
tomed to see in that superstition the sanction of
their morality. For the "practical" proofs of
freedom, immortality, and Providence of which
all evidence in reason or experience had previously
been denied exceed in perfunctory sophistry any
thing that can be imagined. Yet this lamentable
epilogue was in truth the guiding thought of the
whole investigation. Nature had been proved a
figment of human imagination so that, once rid of
all but a mock allegiance to her facts and laws, we
might be free to invent any world we chose and
believe it to be absolutely real and independent of
our nature. Strange prepossession, that while
part of human life and mind was to be an avenue
to reality and to put men in relation to external
and eternal things, the whole of human life and
mind should not be able to do so! Conceptions
VOL. L 7

98 THE LIFE OF REASON

rooted in the very elements of our being, in our
senses, intellect, and imagination, which had
shaped themselves through many generations
under a constant fire of observation and disillu
sion, these were to be called subjective, not only
in the sense in which all knowledge must obvi
ously be so, since it is knowledge that someone
possesses and has gained, but subjective in a dis
paraging sense, and in contrast to some better
form of knowledge. But what better form of
knowledge is this ? If it be a knowledge of things
as they really are and not as they appear, we must
remember that reality means what the intellect
infers from the data of sense; and yet the prin
ciples of such inference, by which the distinction
between appearance and reality is first instituted,
are precisely the principles now to be discarded
as subjective and of merely empirical validity.

" Merely empirical " is a vicious phrase : what is
other than empirical is less than empirical, and
what is not relative to eventual experience is
something given only in present fancy. The gods
of genuine religion, for instance, are terms in a
continual experience: the pure in heart may see
God. If the better and less subjective principle
be said to be the moral law, we must remember
that the moral law which has practical importance
and true dignity deals with facts and forces of
the natural world, that it expresses interests and
aspirations in which man s fate in time and space,
with his pains, pleasures, and all other empirical

ON SOME CKITICS 99

feelings, is concerned. This was not the moral
law to which Kant appealed, for this is a part of
the warp and woof of nature. His moral law was
a personal superstition, irrelevant to the impulse
and need of the world. His notions of the super
natural were those of his sect and generation, and
did not pass to his more influential disciples:
what was transmitted was simply the contempt for
sense and understanding and the practice, author
ised by his modest example, of building air-castles
in the great clearing which the Critique was sup
posed to have made.

It is noticeable in the series of philosophers
from Hobbes to Kant that as the metaphysical
residuum diminished the critical and psychologi
cal machinery increased in volume and value. -~ In
Hobbes and Locke, with the beginnings of empiri
cal psychology, there is mixed an abstract mate
rialism ; in Berkeley, with an extension of analytic
criticism, a popular and childlike theology, en
tirely without rational development; in Hume,
with a completed survey of human habits of idea
tion, a withdrawal into practical conventions ; and
in Kant, with the conception of the creative under
standing firmly grasped and elaborately worked
out, a flight from the natural world altogether:
The Critique a The Critique, in spite of some arti-
mentaT ficialities and pedantries in arrange-

architecture. ment, presented a conception never
before attained of the rich architecture of reason.
It revealed the intricate organisation, comparable

100 THE LIFE OF KEASON

to that of the body, possessed by that fine web of
intentions and counter-intentions whose pulsations
are our thoughts. The dynamic logic of intelli
gence was laid bare, and the hierarchy of ideas, if
not always correctly traced, was at least mani
fested in its principle. It was as great an enlarge
ment of Hume s work as Hume s had been of
Locke s or Locke s of Hobbes s. And the very
fact that the metaphysical residuum practically
disappeared for the weak reconstruction in the
second Critique may be dismissed as irrelevant
renders the work essentially valid, essentially a
description of something real. It is therefore a
great source of instruction and a good compen
dium or store-house for the problems of mind.
But the work has been much overestimated. It
is the product of a confused though laborious
mind. It contains contradictions not merely in
cidental, such as any great novel work must retain
(since no man can at once remodel his whole
vocabulary and opinions) but contradictions abso
lutely fundamental and inexcusable, like that
between the transcendental function of intellect
and its limited authority, or that between the
efficacy of things-in-themselves and their un-
knowability. Kant s assumptions and his conclu
sions, his superstitions and his wisdom, alternate
without neutralising each other.

That experience is a product of two

factors is an assumption made by Kant.

It rests on a psychological analogy, namely on the

ON SOME CRITICS 101

fact that organ and stimulus are both necessary to
sensation. That experience is the substance or mat
ter of nature, which is a construction in thought,
is Kant s conclusion, based on intrinsic logical
analysis. Here experience is evidently viewed as
something uncaused and without conditions, being
itself the source and condition of all thinkable
objects. The relation between the transcen
dental function of experience and its empirical
causes Kant never understood. The transcenden
talism which if we have it at all must be fun
damental, he made derivative! and the realism,
which must then be derivative, he made absolute.
Therefore his metaphysics remained fabulous and
his idealism sceptical or malicious.

Ask what can be meant by " conditions of ex
perience " and Kant s bewildering puzzle solves
itself at the word. Condition, like cause, is a
term that covers a confusion between dialectical
and natural connections. The conditions of ex
perience, in the dialectical sense, are the charac
teristics a thing must have to deserve the name of
experience; in other words, its conditions are its
nominal essence. If experience be used in a loose
sense to mean any given fact or consciousness in
general, the condition of experience is merely im
mediacy. If it be used, as it often is in empirical
writers, for the shock of sense, its conditions are
two: a sensitive organ and an object capable of
stimulating it. If finally experience be given its

102 THE LIFE OF REASON

highest and most pregnant import and mean a
fund of knowledge gathered by living, the condi-
> tion of experience is intelligence. Taking the
word in this last sense, Kant showed in a confused
but essentially conclusive fashion that only by the
application of categories to immediate data could
knowledge of an ordered universe arise; or, in
other language, that knowledge is a vista, that it
has a perspective, since it is the presence to a
given thought of a diffused and articulated land
scape. The categories are the principles of inter
pretation by which the flat datum acquires this
perspective in thought and becomes representa
tive of a whole system of successive or collateral
existences.

The circumstance that experience, in the second
sense, is a term reserved for what has certain
natural conditions, namely, for the spark flying
from the contact of stimulus and organ, led Kant
to shift his point of view, and to talk half the time
about conditions in the sense of natural causes or
needful antecedents. Intelligence is not an ante
cedent of thought and knowledge but their char
acter and logical energy. Synthesis is not a
natural but only a dialectical condition of preg
nant experience; it does not introduce such ex
perience but constitutes it. Nevertheless, the
whole skeleton and dialectical mould of experi
ence came to figure, in Kant s mythology, as
machinery behind the scenes, as a system of non-
natural efficient forces, as a partner in a marriage

ON SOME CRITICS 103

the issue of which was human thought. The idea
could thus suggest itself favoured also by remem
bering inopportunely the actual psychological
situation that all experience, in every sense of the
word, had supernatural antecedents, and that the
dialectical conditions of experience, in the highest
sense, were efficient conditions of experience in
the lowest.

It is hardly necessary to observe that absolute
experience can have no natural conditions. Ex
istence in the abstract can have no cause; for
every real condition would have to be a factor in
absolute experience, and every cause would be
something existent. Of course there is a modest
and non-exhaustive experience that is, any par
ticular sensation, thought, or life which it would
be preposterous to deny was subject to natural
conditions. Saint Lawrence s experience of being
roasted, for instance, had conditions; some of
them were the fire, the decree of the court, and his
own stalwart Christianity. But these conditions
are other parts or objects of conceivable experi
ence which, as we have learned, fall into a system
with the part we say they condition. In our grop-
Naturethe * n & an ^ inferential thought one part
true system may become a ground for expecting or
of conditions. SU p pos i n g the other. Nature is then ]
the sum total of its own conditions ; the whole
object, the parts observed plus the parts interpo
lated, is the self-existent fact. The mind, in its
empirical flux, is a part of this complex ; to say it

104 THE LIFE OF REASON

is its own condition or that of the other objects
is a grotesque falsehood. A babe s casual sensa
tion of light is a condition neither of his own
existence nor of his mother s. The true condi
tions are those other parts of the world without
which, as we find by experience, sensations of
light do not appear.

Had Kant been trained in a better school of phi
losophy he might have felt that the phrase "subject
ive conditions " is a controdiction in terms. When
we find ourselves compelled to go behind the actual
and imagine something antecedent or latent to
pave the way for it, we are ipso facto conceiving
the potential, that is, the " objective " world. All
antecedents, by transcendental necessity, are there
fore objective and all conditions natural. An
imagined potentiality that holds together the epi
sodes which are actual in consciousness is the very
definition of an object or thing. Nature is the
sum total of things potentially observable, some
observed actually, others interpolated hypotheti-
cally ; and common-sense is right as against Kant s
subjectivism in regarding nature as the condition
of mind and not mind as the condition of nature.
This is not to say that experience and feeling are
not the only given existence, from which the mate
rial part of nature, something essentially dynamic
and potential, must be intelligently inferred. But
are not " conditions " inferred ? Are they not, in
their deepest essence, potentialities and powers?
Kant s fabled conditions also are inferred; but

ON SOME CKITICS 105

they are inferred illegitimately since the " sub
jective " ones are dialectical characters turned into
antecedents, while the thing-in-itself is a natural
object without a natural function. Experience
alone being given, it is the ground from which its
conditions are inferred: its conditions, therefore,
are empirical. The secondary position of nature
goes with the secondary position of all causes,
objects, conditions, and ideals. To have made the
conditions of experience metaphysical, and prior
in the order of knowledge to experience itself, was
simply a piece of surviving Platonism. The form
was hypostasised into an agent, and mythical
machinery was imagined to impress that form on
whatever happened to have it.

All this was opposed to Kant s own discovery
and to his critical doctrine which showed that the
world (which is the complex of those conditions
which experience assigns to itself as it develops
and progresses in knowledge) is not before experi
ence in the order of knowledge, but after it. His
fundamental oversight and contradiction lay in
not seeing that the concept of a set of conditions
was the precise and exact concept of nature, which
he consequently reduplicated, having one nature
before experience and another after. The first
thus became mythical and the second illusory : for
the first, said to condition experience, was a set
of verbal ghosts, while the second, which alone
could be observed or discovered scientifically, was
declared fictitious. The truth is that the single

106 THE LIFE OF EEASON

nature or set of conditions for experience which
the intellect constructs is the object of our
thoughts and perceptions ideally completed. This
is neither mythical nor illusory. It is, strictly
! speaking, in its system and in many of its parts,
hypothetical ; but the hypothesis is absolutely safe.
At whatever point we test it, we find the experi
ence we expect, and the inferences thence made
by the intellect are verified in sense at every
moment of existence.

The ambiguity in Kant s doctrine
pathos in sub- makes him a confusing representative
of that criticism of perception which
malicious psychology has to offer. When the mind
has made its great discovery; when it has recog
nised independent objects, and thus taken a first
step in its rational life, we need to know unequivo
cally whether this step is a false or a true one. If
it be false, reason is itself misleading, since a
hypothesis indispensable in the intellectual mas
tery of experience is a false hypothesis and the
detail of experience has no substructure. Now
Kant s answer was that the discovery of objects
was a true and valid discovery in the field of ex
perience; there were, scientifically speaking,
causes for perception which could be inferred from
perception by thought. But this inference was
not true absolutely or metaphysically because there
was a real world beyond possible experience, and
there were oracles, not intellectual, by which
knowledge of that unrealisable world might be ob-

ON SOME CRITICS 107

tained. This mysticism undid the intellectualism
which characterised Kant s system in its scientific
and empirical application; so that the justifica
tion for the use of such categories as that of cause
and substance (categories by which the idea of
reality is constituted) was invalidated by the
counter-assertion that empirical reality was not
true reality but, being an object reached by infer
ential thought, was merely an idea. Nor was the
true reality appearance itself in its crude imme
diacy, as sceptics would think; it was a realm of
objects present to a supposed intuitive thought,
that is, to a non-inferential inference or non-dis
cursive discourse.

So that while Kant insisted on the point, which
hardly needed pressing, that it is mind that dis
covers empirical reality by making inferences
from the data of sense, he admitted at the same
time that such use of understanding is legitimate
and even necessary, and that the idea of nature
so framed his empirical truth. There remained,
however, a sense that this empirical truth was
somehow insufficient and illusory. Understand
ing was a superficial faculty, and we might by
other and oracular methods arrive at a reality that
was not empirical. Why any reality such as
God, for instance should not be just as empirical
as the other side of the moon, if experience sug
gested it and reason discovered it, or why, if not
suggested by experience and discovered by reason,
anything should be called a reality at all or should

108 THE LIFE OF REASON

hold for a moment a man s waking attention that
is what Kant never tells us and never himself
knew.

Clearer upon this question of perception is the
position of Berkeley; we may therefore take him
as a fair representative of those critics who seek
to invalidate the discovery of material objects.

Our ideas, said Berkeley, were in our minds;
the material world was patched together out of
our ideas; it therefore existed only in our minds.
To the suggestion that the idea of the external
world is of course in our minds, but that our
minds have constructed it by treating sensations
as effects of a permanent substance distributed in
a permanent space, he would reply that this means
nothing, bcause " substance," " permanence," and
" space " are non-existent ideas, i.e., they are not
images in sense. They might, however, be
" notions " like that of " spirit," which Berkeley
ingenuously admitted into his system, to be, mys-
B teriously enough, that which has ideas,

algebra of Or they might be (what would do just

perception. &g Wfi jj QJ . our p ur p 0ge ) ^hat w hich he

elsewhere called them, algebraic signs used to fa
cilitate the operations of thought. This is, indeed,
what they are, if we take the word algebraic in
a loose enough sense. They are like algebraic
signs in being, in respect of their object or sig
nification, not concrete images but terms in a men
tal process, elements in a method of inference.
Why, then, denounce them? They could be used

ON SOME CRITICS 109

with all confidence to lead us back to the concrete
values for which they stood and to the relations
which they enabled us to state and discover. Ex
perience would thus be furnished with an intel
ligible structure and articulation, and a psycho
logical analysis would be made of knowledge into
its sensuous material and its ideal objects. What,
then, was Berkeley s objection to these algebraic
methods of inference and to the notions of space,
matter, independent existence, and efficient cau
sality which these methods involve?
Horror of What he abhorred was the belief

physics. that such methods of interpreting ex
perience were ultimate and truly valid, and that
by thinking after the fashion of " mathematical
atheists " we could understand experience as well
as it can be understood. If the flux of ideas had
no other key to it than that system of associations
and algebraic substitutions which is called the
natural world we should indeed know just as well
what to expect in practice and should receive the
same education in perception and reflection; but
what difference would there be between such an
idealist and the most pestilential materialist, save
his even greater wariness and scepticism ? Berke
ley at this time long before days of " Siris " and
tar-water was too ignorant and hasty to under
stand how inane all spiritual or poetic ideals would
be did they not express man s tragic dependence
on nature and his congruous development in her
bosom. He lived in an age when the study and

110 THE LIFE OF EEASON

dominion of external things no longer served
directly spiritual uses. The middle-men had ap
peared, those spirits in whom the pursuit of the
true and the practical never leads to possession of
the good, but loses itself, like a river in sand, amid
irrational habits and passions. He was accord
ingly repelled by whatever philosophy was in him,
no less than by his religious prejudices, from sub
mergence in external interests, and he could see
no better way of vindicating the supremacy of
moral goods than to deny the reality of matter,
the finality of science, and the constructive powers
of reason altogether. With honest English em
piricism he saw that science had nothing absolute
or sacrosanct about it, and rightly placed the value
of theory in its humane uses ; but the complement-
, ary truth escaped him altogether that only the free
and contemplative expression of reason, of which
science is a chief part, can render anything else
humane, useful, or practical. He was accordingly
a party man in philosophy, where partisanship is
treason, and opposed the work of reason in the
theoretical field, hoping thus to advance it in the
moral.

Of the moral field he had, it need hardly be
added, a quite childish and perfunctory concep-
Puermtyin tion. There the prayer-book and the
morals. catechism could solve every problem.

He lacked the feeling, possessed by all large and
mature minds, that there would be no intelligi
bility or value in things divine were they not inter-

ON SOME CRITICS 111

pretations and sublimations of things natural.
To master the real world was an ancient and not
too promising ambition : it suited his youthful
radicalism better to exorcise or to cajole it. He
sought to refresh the world with a water-spout of
idealism, as if to change the names of things could
change their values. Away with all arid investi
gation, away with the cold algebra of sense and
reason., and let us have instead a direct conversa
tion with heaven, an unclouded vision of the pur
poses and goodness of God; as if there were any
other way of understanding the sources of human
happiness than to study the ways of nature and
man.

Converse with God has been the life of many
a wiser and sadder philosopher than Berkeley;
but they, like Plato, for instance, or Spinoza,
have made experience the subject as well as
the language of that intercourse, and have thus
given the divine revelation some degree of perti
nence and articulation. Berkeley in his positive
doctrine was satisfied with the vaguest generali
ties; he made no effort to find out how the con
sciousness that God is the direct author of our
incidental perceptions is to help us to deal with
them ; what other insights and principles are to be
substituted for those that disclose the economy of
nature; how the moral difficulties incident to an
absolute providentialism are to be met, or how the
existence and influence of fellow-minds is to be
defended. So that to a piety inspired by con-

112 THE LIFE OF REASON

ventional theology and a psychology that refused
to pass, except grudgingly and unintelligently,
beyond the sensuous stratum, Berkeley had noth
ing to add by way of philosophy. An insignifi
cant repetition of the truism that ideas are all
" in the mind " constituted his total wisdom. To
be was to be perceived. That was the great maxim
by virtue of which we were asked, if not to refrain
from conceiving nature at all, which was perhaps
impossible at so late a stage in human develop
ment, at least to refrain from regarding our neces
sary thoughts on nature as true or rational. In
telligence was but a false method of imagination
by which God trained us in action and thought;
for it was apparently impossible to endow us with
a true method that would serve that end. And
what shall we think of the critical acumen or prac
tical wisdom of a philosopher who dreamed of
some other criterion of truth than necessary impli
cation in thought and action?
Truism and I n ^ ne melodramatic fashion so corn-
sophism. mon i n what is called philosophy we
may delight ourselves with such flashes of light
ning as this : esse est percipi. The truth of this
paradox lies in the fact that through perception
alone can we get at being a modest and familiar
notion which makes, as Plato s " Theaetetus" shows,
not a bad point of departure for a serious theory of
knowledge. The sophistical intent of it, however,
is to deny our right to make a distinction which
in fact we do make and which the speaker him-

ON SOME CRITICS 113

self is making as he utters the phrase; for he
would not be so proud of himself if he thought
he was thundering a tautology. If a thing were
never perceived, or inferred from perception,, we
should indeed never know that it existed ; but once
perceived or inferred it may be more conducive to
comprehension and practical competence to regard
it as existing independently of our perception;
and our ability to make this supposition is reg
istered in the difference between the two words
to l)e and to le perceived words which are by no
means synonymous but designate two very differ
ent relations of things in thought. Such idealism
at one fell swoop, through a collapse of assertive
intellect and a withdrawal of reason into self-con
sciousness, has the puzzling character of any clever
pun, that suspends the fancy between two incom
patible but irresistible meanings. The art of such
sophistry is to choose for an axiom some ambigu
ous phrase which taken in one sense is a truism
and taken in another is an absurdity; and then,
by showing the truth of that truism, to give out
that the absurdity has also been proved. It is a
truism to say that I am the only seat or locus of
my ideas, and that whatever I know is known by
me; it is an absurdity to say that I am the only
object of my thought and perception.
Reality is To confuse the instrument with its

thepracti- f unc ti on and the operation with its

cal made

intelligible. meaning has been a persistent foible in
modern philosophy. It could thus come about
VOL. I 8

114 THE LIFE OF REASON

that the function of intelligence should be
altogether misconceived and in consequence de
nied, when it was discovered that figments of rea
son could never become elements of sense but
must always remain, as of course they should,
4 ideal and regulative objects, and therefore objects
to which a practical and energetic intellect will
tend to give the name of realities. Matter is a
reality to the practical intellect because it is a
necessary and ideal term in the mastery of experi
ence; while negligible sensations, like dreams, are
called illusions by the same authority because,
though actual enough while they last, they have
no sustained function and no right to practical
dominion.

Let us imagine Berkeley addressing himself to
that infant or animal consciousness which first
used the category of substance and passed from
its perceptions to the notion of an independent
thing. " Beware, my child," he would have said,
" you are taking a dangerous step, one which may
hereafter produce a multitude of mathematical
atheists, not to speak of cloisterfuls of scholastic
triflers. Your ideas can exist only in your mind ;
if you suffer yourself to imagine them materialised
in mid-air and subsisting when you do not per
ceive them, you will commit a great impiety. If
you unthinkingly believe that when you shut your
eyes the world continues to exist until you open
them again, you will inevitably be hurried into an
infinity of metaphysical quibbles about the discrete

ON SOME CRITICS 115

and the continuous, and you will be so bewildered
and deafened by perpetual controversies that the
clear light of the gospel will be extinguished in
your soul." " But/ that tender Peripatetic might
answer, "I cannot forget the things about me when
I shut my eyes : I know and almost feel their per
sistent presence, and I always find them again,
upon trial, just as they were before, or just in
that condition to which the operation of natural
causes would have brought them in my absence.
If I believe they remain and suffer steady and
imperceptible transformation, I know what to
expect, and the event does not deceive me; but
if I had to resolve upon action before knowing
whether the conditions for action were to exist
or no, I should never understand what sort of a
world I lived in."

"Ah, my child," the good Bishop would reply,
" you misunderstand me. You may indeed, nay,
you must, live and think as if everything remained
independently real. That is part of your education
for heaven, which God in his goodness provides for
you in this life. He will send into your soul at
every moment the impressions needed to verify
your necessary hypotheses and support your hum
ble and prudent expectations. Only you must
not attribute that constancy to the things them
selves which is due to steadfastness in the designs
of Providence. Think and act as if a material
world existed, but do not for a moment believe it
to exist."

116 THE LIFE OF KEASON

Vain " reaii- With this advice, coming reassur-
ties"and ingly from the combined forces of

trustworthy & J

"fictions." scepticism and religion, we may leave
the embryonic mind to its own devices, satisfied
that even according to the most malicious
psychologists its first step toward the comprehen
sion of experience is one it may congratulate itself
on having taken and which, for the present at
least, it is not called upon to retrace. The Life
of Reason is not concerned with speculation about
unthinkable and gratuitous " realities " ; it seeks
merely to attain those conceptions which are nec
essary and appropriate to man in his acting and
thinking. The first among these, underlying all
arts and philosophies alike, is the indispensable
conception of permanent external objects, forming
in their congeries, shifts, and secret animation the
system and life of nature.

NOTE There is a larger question raised by Berkeley s
arguments Avhich I have not attempted to discuss here,
namely, whether knowledge is possible at all, and whether
any mental representation can be supposed to inform us
about anything. Berkeley of course assumed this power in
that he continued to believe in God, in other spirits, in the
continuity of experience, and in its discoverable laws. His
objection to material objects, therefore, could not consist
ently be that they are objects of knowledge rather than
absolute feelings, exhausted by their momentary possession
in consciousness. It could only be that they are unthink
able and invalid objects, in which the materials of sense are
given a mode of existence inconsistent with their nature.
But if the only criticism to which material objects were ob
noxious were a dialectical criticism, such as that contained
in Kant s antinomies, the royal road to idealism coveted by

ON SOME CRITICS 117

Berkeley would be blocked ; to be an idea in the mind
would not involve lack of cognitive and representative value
in that idea. The fact that material objects were represented
or conceived would not of itself prove that they could not
have a real existence. It would be necessary, to prove their
unreality, to study their nature and function and to compare
them with such conceptions as those of Providence and a
spirit-world in order to determine their relative validity.
Such a critical comparison would have augured ill for
Berkeley s prejudices ; what its result might have been we
can see in Kant s Critique of Pare Reason. In order to
escape such evil omens and prevent the collapse of his
mystical paradoxes, Berkeley keeps in reserve a much
more insidious weapon, the sceptical doubt as to the repre
sentative character of anything mental, the possible illusive-
ness of all knowledge. This doubt he invokes in all those
turns of thought and phrase in which he suggests that if an idea
is in the mind it cannot have its counterpart elsewhere, and
that a given cognition exhausts and contains its object.
There are, then, two separate maxims in his philosophy, one
held consistently, viz. , that nothing can be known which is
different in character or nature from the object present to
the thinking mind ; the other, held incidentally and incon
sistently, since it is destructive of all predication and knowl
edge, viz., that nothing can exist beyond the mind which is
similar in nature or character to the " ideas " within it; or,
to put the same thing in other words, that nothing can be re
vealed by an idea which is different from that idea in point
of existence. The first maxim does not contradict the ex
istence of external objects in space ; the second contradicts
every conception that the human mind can ever form, the
most airy no less than the grossest. No idealist can go so
far as to deny that bis memory represents his past experience
by inward similarity and conscious intention, or, if he pre
fers this language, that the moments or aspects of the divine
mind represent one another and their general system. Else
the idealist s philosophy itself would be an insignificant and
momentary illusion.

CHAPTER V

NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED

Man s feeble When the mind has learned to dis-
nature f tinguish external objects and to at
tribute to them a constant size, shape,
and potency, in spite of the variety and intermit-
tence ruling in direct experience, there yet remains
a great work to do before attaining a clear, even
if superficial, view of the world. An animal s
customary habitat may have constant features and
their relations in space may be learned by con
tinuous exploration; but probably many other
landscapes are also within the range of memory
and fancy that stand in no visible relation to the
place in which we find ourselves at a given
moment. It is true that, at this day, we take it
for granted that all real places, as we call them,
lie in one space, in which they hold definite geo
metric relations to one another; and if we have
glimpses of any region for which no room can be
found in the single map of the universe which
astronomy has drawn, we unhesitatingly relegate
that region to the land of dreams. Since the
Elysian Fields and the Coast of Bohemia have
no assignable latitude and longitude, we call these

118

NATURE UNIFIED 119

places imaginary, even if in some dream we re
member to have visited them and dwelt there with
no less sense of reality than in this single and
geometrical world of commerce. It belongs to
sanity and common-sense, as men now possess
them, to admit no countries unknown to geography
and filling no part of the conventional space in
three dimensions. All our waking experience is
understood to go on in some part of this space,
and no court of law would admit evidence relating
to events in some other sphere.

This principle, axiomatic as it has become, is in
no way primitive, since primitive experience is
sporadic and introduces us to detached scenes
separated by lapses in our senses and attention.
These scenes do not hang together in any local
contiguity. To construct a chart of the world is
a difficult feat of synthetic imagination, not to be
performed without speculative boldness and a
heroic insensibility to the claims of fancy. Even
now most people live without topographical ideas
and have no clear conception of the spatial rela
tions that keep together the world in which they
move. They feel their daily way about like
animals, following a habitual scent, without dom
inating the range of their instinctive wanderings.
Reality is rather a story to them than a system of
objects and forces, nor would they think them
selves mad if at any time their experience should
wander into a fourth dimension. Vague dramatic
and moral laws, when they find any casual ap-

120 THE LIFE OF KEASON

plication, seem to such dreaming minds more
notable truths, deeper revelations of efficacious
reality, than the mechanical necessities of the case,
which they scarcely conceive of; and in this pri
mordial prejudice they are confirmed by supersti
tious affinities often surviving In their religion
and philosophy. In the midst of cities and affairs
they are like landsmen at sea, incapable of an in
tellectual conception of their position: nor have
they any complete confidence in their principles
of navigation. They know the logarithms by rote
merely, and if they reflect are reduced to a stupid
wonder and only half believe they are in a known
universe or will ever reach an earthly port. It
would not require superhuman eloquence in some
prophetic passenger to persuade them to throw
compass and quadrant overboard and steer enthu
siastically for El Dorado. The theory of naviga
tion is essentially as speculative as that of salva
tion, only it has survived more experiences of the*
judgment and repeatedly brought those who trust
in it to their promised land.

its unity ideal The theory that all real objects and
and discover- pl ace s lie together in one even and

able only by * .....

steady homogeneous space, conceived as simi-

thought. j ar j n ftg constitution to the parts of

extension of which we have immediate intuition, is
a theory of the greatest practical importance and
validity. By its light we carry on all our affairs,
and the success of our action while we rely upon it
is the best proof of its truth. The imaginative

NATURE UNIFIED 121

parsimony and discipline which such a theory in
volves are balanced by the immense extension and
certitude it gives to knowledge. It is at once an
act of allegiance to nature and a Magna Charta
which mind imposes on the tyrannous world, which
in turn pledges itself before the assembled facul
ties of man not to exceed its constitutional privi
lege and to harbour no magic monsters in unattain
able lairs from which they might issue to disturb
human labours. Yet that spontaneous intelligence
which first enabled men to make this genial dis
covery and take so fundamental a step toward
taming experience should not be laid by after this
first victory; it is a weapon needed in many sub
sequent conflicts. To conceive that all nature
makes one system is only a beginning : the articu
lation of natural life has still to be discovered in
detail and, what is more, a similar articulation
has to be given to the psychic world which now, by
me very act that constitutes Nature and makes
her consistent, appears at her side or rather in
her bosom.

That the unification of nature is eventual and
theoretical is a point useful to remember : else the
relation of the natural world to poetry, meta
physics, and religion will never become intelligible.
Lalande, or whoever it was, who searched the
heavens with his telescope and could find no God,
would not have found the human mind if he had
searched the brain with a microscope. Yet God
existed in man s apprehension long before mathe-

122 THE LIFE OF EEASON

matics or even, perhaps, before the vault of
heaven; for the objectification of the whole mind,
with its passions and motives, naturally precedes
that abstraction by which the idea of a material
world is drawn from the chaos of experience, an
abstraction which culminates in such atomic and
astronomical theories as science is now familiar
with. The sense for life in things, be they small
or great, is not derived from the abstract idea of
their bodies but is an ancient concomitant to that
idea, inseparable from it until it became abstract.
Truth and materiality, mechanism and ideal in
terests, are collateral projections from one rolling
experience, which shows up one aspect or the other
as it develops various functions and dominates
itself to various ends. When one ore is abstracted
and purified, the residuum subsists in that prime
val quarry in which it originally lay. The failure
to find God among the stars, or even the attempt
to find him there, does not indicate that human
experience affords no avenue to the idea of God
for history proves the contrary but indicates
rather the atrophy in this particular man of the
imaginative faculty by which his race had attained
to that idea. Such an atrophy might indeed
become general, and God would in that case dis
appear from human experience as music would dis
appear if universal deafness attacked the race.
Such an event is made conceivable by the loss of
allied imaginative habits, which is observable in
historic times. Yet possible variations in human

NATURE UNIFIED 123

faculty do not involve the illegitimacy of such
faculties as actually subsist ; and the abstract world
known to science,, unless it dries up the ancient
fountains of ideation by its habitual presence in
thought, does not remove those parallel dramatisa
tions or abstractions which experience may have
suggested to men.

What enables men to perceive the unity of
nature is the unification of their own wills. A
man half-asleep, without fixed purposes, without
intellectual keenness or joy in recognition, might
graze about like an animal, forgetting each satis
faction in the next and banishing from his frivo
lous mind the memory of every sorrow; what had
just failed to kill him would leave him as thought
less and unconcerned as if it had never crossed
his path. Such irrational elasticity and innocent
improvidence would never put two and two
together. Every morning there would be a new
world with the same fool to live in it. But let
some sobering passion, some serious interest, lend
perspective to the mind, and a point of reference
will immediately be given for protracted observa
tion; then the laws of nature will begin to dawn
upon thought. Every experiment will become a
lesson, every event will be remembered as favour
able or unfavourable to the master-passion. At
first, indeed, this keen observation will probably
be animistic and the laws discovered will be
chiefly habits, human or divine, special favours or
envious punishments and warnings. But the same

124 THE LIFE OF REASON

constancy of aim which discovers the dramatic con
flicts composing society, and tries to read nature
in terms of passion, will, if it be long sustained,
discover behind this glorious chaos a deeper
mechanical order. Men s thoughts, like the
weather, are not so arbitrary as they seem and the
true master in observation, the man guided by a
steadfast and superior purpose, will see them re
volving about their centres in obedience to quite
calculable instincts, and the principle of all their
flutterings will not be hidden from his eyes.
Belief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermina-
tion. No commanding or steady intellect flirts
with so miserable a possibility, which in so far as
it actually prevailed would make virtue impotent
and experience, in its pregnant sense, impossible.
Mind the We have said that those objects

duTof exist- wn i cn cannot be incorporated into the
ence. one space which the understanding

envisages are relegated to another sphere called
imagination. We reach here a most important
corollary. As material objects, making a single
system which fills space and evolves in time, are
conceived by abstraction from the flux of sensuous
experience, so, pari passu, the rest of experience,
with all its other outgrowths and concretions, falls
out with the physical world and forms the sphere
of mind, the sphere of memory, fancy, and the
passions. We have in this discrimination the
genesis of mind, not of course in the transcenden
tal sense in which the word mind is extended to

NATURE UNIFIED 125

mean the sum total and mere fact of existence
for mind, so taken, can have no origin and indeed
no specific meaning but the genesis of mind as
a determinate form of being, a distinguishable part
of the universe known to experience and discourse,
the mind that unravels itself in meditation, in
habits animal bodies, and is studied in psychology.
Mind, in this proper sense of the word, is the
residue of existence, the leavings, so to speak,
and parings of experience when the material world
has been cut out of the whole cloth. Eeflection
underlines in the chaotic continuum of sense and
longing those aspects that have practical signifi
cance; it selects the efficacious ingredients in the
world. The trustworthy object which is thus re
tained in thought, the complex of connected
events, is nature, and though so intelligible an
object is not soon nor vulgarly recognised, because
human reflection is perturbed and halting, yet every
forward step in scientific and practical knowledge
is a step toward its clearer definition. At first
much parasitic matter clings to that dynamic
skeleton. Nature is drawn like a sponge heavy
and dripping from the waters of sentience. It is
soaked with inefficacious passions and overlaid
with idle accretions. Nature, in a word, is at first
conceived mythically, dramatically, and retains
much of the unintelligible, sporadic habit of ani
mal experience itself. But as attention awakes
and discrimination, practically inspired, grows
firm and stable, irrelevant qualities are stripped

126 THE LIFE OF KEASON

off, and the mechanical process, the efficacious in
fallible order, is clearly disclosed beneath. Mean
time the incidental effects, the " secondary quali
ties," are relegated to a personal inconsequential
region; they constitute the realm of appearance,
the realm of mind.

Ghostly char- Mind is therefore sometimes identi-
acter of mind, fied with the unreal. We oppose, in
an antithesis natural to thought and language, the
imaginary to the true, fancy to fact, idea to thing.
But this thing, fact, or external reality is, as we
have seen, a completion and hypostasis of certain
portions of experience, packed into such shapes as
prove cogent in thought and practice. The stuff
of external reality, the matter out of which its idea
is made, is therefore continuous with the stuff and
matter of our own minds. Their common sub
stance is the immediate flux. This living worm
has propagated by fission, and the two halves into
which it has divided its life are mind and nature.
Mind has kept and clarified the crude appearance,
the dream, the purpose that seethed in the mass;
nature has appropriated the order, the constant
conditions, the causal substructure, disclosed in
reflection, by which the immediate flux is ex
plained and controlled. The chemistry of
thought has precipitated these contrasted terms,
each maintaining a recognisable identity and hav
ing the function of a point of reference for
memory and will. Some of these terms or objects
of thought we call things and marshal in all their

NATURE UNIFIED 127

ideal stability for there is constancy in their
motions and transformations to make the intel
ligible external world of practice and science.
Whatever stuff has not been absorbed in this con
struction,, whatever facts of sensation, ideation, or
will, do not coalesce with the newest conception
of reality, we then call the mind.

Eaw experience, then, lies at the basis of the
idea of nature and approves its reality; while an
equal reality belongs to the residue of experience,
not taken up, as yet, into that idea. But this resid
ual sensuous reality often seems comparatively
unreal because what it presents is entirely without
practical force apart from its mechanical asso
ciates. This inconsequential character of what
remains over follows of itself from the concretion
of whatever is constant and efficacious into the
external world. If this fact is ever called in ques
tion, it is only because the external world is
vaguely conceived, and loose wills and ideas are
thought to govern it by magic. Yet in many ways
falling short of absolute precision people recognise
that thought is not dynamic or, as they call it,
not real. The idea of the physical world is the
first flower or thick cream of practical thinking.
Being skimmed off first and proving so nutri-
cious, it leaves the liquid below somewhat thin and
unsavoury. Especially does this result appear
when science is still unpruned and mythical, so
that what passes into the idea of material nature
is much more than the truly causal network of

128 THE LIFE OF EEASON

forces, and includes many spiritual and moral
functions.

The material world, as conceived in the first in
stance, had not that clear abstractness, nor the
spiritual world that wealth and interest, which they
have acquired for modern minds. The complex
reactions of man s soul had been objectified
together with those visual and tactile sensations
which, reduced to a mathematical baldness, now
furnish terms to natural science. Mind then
dwelt in the world, not only in the warmth and
beauty with which it literally clothed material
objects, as it still does in poetic perception, but in
a literal animistic way; for human passion and
reflection were attributed to every object and made
a fairy-land of the world. Poetry and religion dis
cerned life in those very places in which sense and
understanding perceived body; and when so much
of the burden of experience took wing into space,
and the soul herself floated almost visibly among
the forms of nature, it is no marvel that the poor
remnant, a mass of merely personal troubles, an
uninteresting distortion of things in individual
minds, should have seemed a sad and unsubstan-
j tial accident. The inner world was all the more
ghostly because the outer world was so much alive.
Hypostasis This movement of thought, which

bo?hTeed Sm clotned external objects in all the
control. wealth of undeciphered dreams, has

long lost its momentum and yielded to a contrary
tendency. Just as the hypostasis of some terms

NATURE UNIFIED 129

in experience is sanctioned by reason, when the
objects so fixed and externalised can serve as
causes and explanations for the order of events,
so the criticism which tends to retract that hypos-
tasis is sanctioned by reason when the hypostasis
has exceeded its function and the external object
conceived is loaded with useless ornament. The
transcendental and functional secret of such
hypostases, however, is seldom appreciated by the
headlong mind; so that the ebb no less than the
flow of objectification goes on blindly and impul
sively, and is carried to absurd extremes. An age ,
of mythology yields to an age of subjectivity ; rea
son being equally neglected and exceeded in both.
The reaction against imagination has left the ex-
ternal world, as represented in many minds, stark j
and bare. All the interesting and vital qualities
which matter had once been endowed with have
been attributed instead to an irresponsible sensi
bility in man. And as habits of ideation change
slowly and yield only piecemeal to criticism or to
fresh intuitions, such a revolution has not been
carried out consistently, but instead of a thorough
renaming of things and a new organisation of
thought it has produced chiefly distress and con
fusion. Some phases of this confusion may per
haps repay a moment s attention ; they may enable
us, when seen in their logical sequence, to under
stand somewhat better the hypostasising intellect
that is trying to assert itself and come to the light
through all these gropings.
VOL. L-9

130 THE LIFE OF REASON

comparative What helps in the first place to dis-

ob^c^and" 1 c l sea P ermanen t object is a permanent
in ideas. sensation. There is a vast and clear dif
ference between a floating and a fixed feeling ; the
latter, in normal circumstances, is present only
when continuous stimulation renews it at every
moment. Attention may wander, but the objects
in the environment do not cease to radiate their
influences on the body, which is thereby not
allowed to lose the modification which those in
fluences provoke. The consequent perception is
therefore always at hand and in its repetitions sub
stantially identical. Perceptions not renewed in
this way by continuous stimulation come and go
with cerebral currents; they are rare visitors,
instead of being, like external objects, members
of the household. Intelligence is most at home in
the ultimate, which is the object of intent. Those
realities which it can trust and continually recover
are its familiar and beloved companions. The
mists that may originally have divided it from
them, and which psychologists call the mind, are
gladly forgotten so soon as intelligence avails to
pierce them, and as friendly communication can
be established with the real world. Moreover, per
ceptions not sustained by a constant external
stimulus are apt to be greatly changed when they
reappear, and to be changed unaccountably,
whereas external things show some method and
proportion in their variations. Even when not
much changed in themselves, mere ideas fall into

NATURE UNIFIED 131

a new setting, whereas things, unless something
else has intervened to move them, reappear in
their old places. Finally things are acted upon by
other men, but thoughts are hidden from them by
divine miracle.

Existence reveals reality when the flux discloses
something permanent that dominates it. What is
thus dominated, though it is the primary existence
itself, is thereby degraded to appearance. Percep
tions caused by external objects are, as we have just
seen, long sustained in comparison with thoughts
and fancies ; but the objects are themselves in flux
and a man s relation to them may be even more
variable; so that very often a memory or a senti
ment will recur, almost unchanged in character,
long after the perception that first aroused it has
become impossible. The brain, though mobile, is
subject to habit; its formations, while they lapse
instantly, return again and again. These ideal
objects may accordingly be in a way more real .
and enduring than things external. Hence no
primitive mind puts all reality, or what is most
real in reality, in an abstract material universe.
It finds, rather, ideal points of reference by which
material mutation itself seems to be controlled.
An ideal world is recognised from the beginning
and placed, not in the immediate foreground,
nearer than material things, but much farther off.
It has greater substantiality and independence
than material objects are credited with. It is
divine.

132 THE LIFE OF KEASON

When agriculture, commerce, or manual crafts
have given men some knowledge of nature, the
world thus recognised and dominated is far from
seeming ultimate. It is thought to lie between
two others, both now often called mental, but in
their original quality altogether disparate: the
world of spiritual forces and that of sensuous
appearance. The notions of permanence and in
dependence by which material objects are con
ceived apply also, of course, to everything spirit
ual; and while the dominion exercised by spirits
may be somewhat precarious, they are as remote
as possible from immediacy and sensation. They
come and go; they govern nature or, if they neg
lect to do so, it is from aversion or high indiffer
ence ; they visit man with obsessions and diseases ;
they hasten to extricate him from difficulties ; and
they dwell in him, constituting his powers of
conscience and invention. Sense, on the other
hand, is a mere effect, either of body or spirit or
of both in conjunction. It gives a vitiated per
sonal view of these realities. Its pleasures are
dangerous and unintelligent, and it perishes as
it goes.
Spirit and Such are, for primitive appercep-

b e y n their e reTa d - tion > the three S reat Bairns of being:
tion to nature, nature, sense, and spirit. Their
frontiers, however, always remain uncertain.
Sense, because it is insignificant when made an
object, is long neglected by reflection. No at
tempt is made to describe its processes or ally them

NATURE UNIFIED 133

systematically to natural changes. Its illusions,
when noticed, are regarded as scandals calculated
to foster scepticism. The spiritual world is, on
the other hand, a constant theme for poetry and
speculation. In the absence of ideal science, it
can be conceived only in myths, which are
naturally as shifting and self-contradictory as they
are persistent. They acquire no fixed character
until, in dogmatic religion, they are defined with
reference to natural events, foretold or reported.
Nature is what first acquires a form and then
imparts form to the other spheres. Sense admits
definition and distribution only as an effect of
nature and spirit only as its principle,
vague notions Tne form nature acquires is, how-
of nature in- ever? itself vague and uncertain and

volve vague .,, , -,

notions of can ill serve, for long ages, to define
spirit. the other realms which depend on it

for definition. Hence it has been common, for
instance, to treat the spiritual as a remote or finer
form of the natural. Beyond the moon everything
seemed permanent; it was therefore called divine
and declared to preside over the rest. The breath
that escaped from the lips at death, since it took
away with it the spiritual control and miraculous
life that had quickened the flesh, was itself the
spirit. On the other hand, natural processes have
been persistently attributed to spiritual causes,
for it was not matter that moved itself but intent
that moved it. Thus spirit was barbarously taken
for a natural substance and a natural force. It

134 THE LIFE OF KEASON

was identified with everything in which it was
manifested, so long as no natural causes could be
assigned for that operation.

If the unification of nature were
spirit the life of complete sense would evidently fall
nature, which w ithin it; since it is to subtend and

science redis- . ,,.

tributes but sustain the sensible flux that intelii-
does not deny. gence acknowledges first stray mate
rial objects and then their general system. The
elements of experience not taken up into the con
stitution of objects remain attached to them as
their life. In the end the dynamic skeleton,
without losing its articulation, would be clothed
again with its flesh. Suppose my notions of as
tronomy allowed me to believe that the sun, sink
ing into the sea, was extinguished every evening,
and that what appeared the next morning was his
younger brother, hatched in a sun-producing nest
to be found in the Eastern regions. My theory
would have robbed yesterday s sun of its life and
brightness ; it would have asserted that during the
night no sun existed anywhere ; but it would have
added the sun s qualities afresh to a matter that
did not previously possess them, namely, to the
imagined egg that would produce a sun for to
morrow. Suppose we substitute for that astron
omy the one that now prevails: we have deprived
the single sun which now exists and spreads its
influences without interruption of its humanity
and even of its metaphysical unity. It has become
a congeries of chemical substances. The facts re-

NATUKE UNIFIED 135

vealed to perception have partly changed their
locus and been differently deployed throughout
nature. Some have become attached to operations
in the human brain. Nature has not thereby lost
any quality she had ever manifested; these have
merely been redistributed so as to secure a more
systematic connection between them all. They
are the materials of the system, which has been
conceived by making existences continuous, when
ever this extension of their being was needful to
render their recurrences intelligible. Sense, which
was formerly regarded as a sad distortion of its
objects, now becomes an original and congruent
part of nature, from which, as from any other
part, the rest of nature might be scientifically
inferred.

Spirit is not less closely attached to nature,
although in a different manner. Taken existen-
tially it is a part of sense; taken ideally it is the
form or value which nature acquires when viewed
from the vantage-ground of any interest. Indi
vidual objects are recognisable for a time not
because the flux is materially arrested but because
it somewhere circulates in a fashion which awakens
an interest and brings different parts of the sur
rounding process into definable and prolonged re
lations with that interest. Particular objects may
perish yet others may continue, like the series of
suns imagined by Heraclitus, to perform the same
office. The function will outlast the particular
organ. That interest in reference to which the

136 THE LIFE OF KEASON

function is defined will essentially determine a
perfect world of responsive extensions and con
ditions. These ideals will be a spiritual reality;
and they will be expressed in nature in so far as
nature supports that regulative interest. Many a
perfect and eternal realm, merely potential in ex
istence but definite in constitution, will thus sub
tend nature and be what a rational philosophy
might call the ideal. What is called spirit would
be the ideal in so far as it obtained expression in
nature; and the power attributed to spirit would
be the part of nature s fertility by which such
expression was secured.

CHAPTEK VI

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS

Another back- When a ghostly sphere, containing f
memory and all ideas, has been distin-
guished from the material world, it
tends to grow at the expense of the lat-
ter, until nature is finally reduced to a
mathematical skeleton. This skeleton itself, but for
the need of a bridge to connect calculably episode
with episode in experience, might be transferred to
mind and identified with the scientific thought in
which it is represented. But a scientific theory
inhabiting a few scattered moments of life can
not connect those episodes among which it is itself
the last and the least substantial; nor would such
a notion have occurred even to the most reckless
sceptic, had the world not possessed another sort
of reputed reality the minds of others which
could serve, even after the supposed extinction of
the physical world, to constitute an independent
order and to absorb the potentialities of being
when immediate consciousness nodded. But other
men s minds, being themselves precarious and in
effectual, would never have seemed a possible sub
stitute for nature, to be in her stead the back-
137

138 THE LIFE OF KEASON

ground and intelligible object of experience.
Something constant, omnipresent, infinitely fer
tile is needed to support and connect the given
chaos. Just these properties, however, are actu
ally attributed to one of the minds supposed to
confront the thinker, namely, the mind of God.
The divine mind has therefore always constituted
in philosophy either the alternative to nature or
her other name : it is par excellence the seat of all
potentiality and, as Spinoza said, the refuge of all
ignorance.

Speculative problems would be greatly clarified,
and what is genuine in them would be more easily
distinguished from what is artificial, if we could
gather together again the original sources for the
belief in separate minds and compare these
sources with those we have already assigned to the
conception of nature. But speculative problems
are not alone concerned, for Jin all social life we
envisage fellow-creatures -received to share the
same thoughts and passions and to be similarly
affected by events. What is the basis of this con
viction ? What are the forms it takes, and in what
sense is it a part or an expression of reason?

This question is difficult, and in broaching it we
cannot expect much aid from what philosophers
have hitherto said on the subject. For the most
part, indeed, they have said nothing, as by nature s
kindly disposition most questions which it is
beyond a man s power to answer do not occur to
him at all. The suggestions which have actually

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 139

been made in the matter may be reduced to two :
first, that we conceive other men s minds by pro-
Two usual ac- jccting into their bodies those feelings
conation* 118 which we immediately perceive to ac-
criticised: company similar operations in our
selves, that is, we infer alien minds by analogy;
and second, that we are immediately aware of
them and feel them to be friendly or hostile
counterparts of our own thinking and effort, that
is, we evoke them by dramatic imagination.
analo The first suggestion has the advan-

between tage that it escapes solipsism by a rea-
bodies, sonable argument, provided the exist

ence of the material world has already been
granted. But if the material world is called back
into the private mind, it is evident that every soul
supposed to inhabit it or to be expressed in it must
follow it thither, as inevitably as the characters
and forces in an imagined story must remain with
it in the inventor s imagination. When, on the
contrary, nature is left standing, it is reason
able to suppose that animals having a similar
origin and similar physical powers should have
similar minds, if any of them was to have a
mind at all. The theory, however, is not satis
factory on other grounds. We do not in reality
associate our own grimaces with the feelings that
accompany them and subsequently, on recognis
ing similar grimaces in another, proceed to at
tribute emotions to him like those we formerly
experienced. Our own grimaces are not easily

7

140 THE LIFE OF REASON

perceived, and other men s actions often reveal
passions which we have never had, at least with
anything like their suggested colouring and in
tensity. This first view is strangely artificial and
mistakes for the natural origin of the belief in
question what may be perhaps its ultimate test.
The second suggestion, on the other

and dramatic

dialogue in hand, takes us into a mystic region.

the soul. rp hat we eyoke the f elt goulg of Qur f e }_

lows by dramatic imagination is doubtless true;
but this does not explain how we come to do so,
under what stimulus and in what circumstances.
Nor does it avoid solipsism; for the felt counter
parts of my own will are echoes within me, while
if other minds actually exist they cannot have for
their essence to play a game with me in my own
fancy. Such society would be mythical, and while
the sense for society may well be mythical in its
origin, it must acquire some other character if it
is to have practical and moral validity. But prac
tical and moral validity is above all what society
seems to have. This second theory, therefore,
while its feeling for psychological reality is keener,
does not make the recognition of other minds in
telligible and leaves our faith in them without
justification.

Subject and ^ n approaching the subject afresh
object empiri- w e should do well to remember that

cal, not tran- -, . . , . ,

scendentai, crude experience knows nothing of the
terms. distinction between subject and object.

This distinction is a division in things, a contrast

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 141

established between masses of images which show
different characteristics in their modes of exist
ence and relation. If this truth is overlooked, if
subject and object are made conditions of experi
ence instead of being, like body and mind, its con
trasted parts, the revenge of fate is quick and
ironical ; either subject or object must immediately
collapse and evaporate altogether. All objects
must become modifications of the subject or all
subjects aspects or fragments of the object.
Objects ongi- Now the ^ ac ^ that cru ^ e experience
naiiy soaked i$ innocent of modern philosophy has
andTertiary 7 this important consequence: that for
qualities. crude experience all data whatever lie
originally side by side in the same field ; extension
is passionate, desire moves bodies, thought broods
in space and is constituted by a visible metamor
phosis of its subject matter. Animism or mythol
ogy is therefore no artifice. Passions naturally
reside in the object they agitate our own body,
if that be the felt seat of some pang, the stars, if
the pang can find no nearer resting-place. Only
a long and still unfinished education has taught
men to separate emotions from things and ideas
from their objects. This education was needed
because crude experience is a chaos, and the quali
ties it jumbles together do not march together in
time. Eeflection must accordingly separate them,
if knowledge (that is, ideas with eventual appli
cation and practical transcendence) is to exist at
all. In other words, action must be adjusted to

142 THE LIFE OF KEASON

certain elements of experience and not to others,
and those chiefly regarded must have a certain
interpretation put upon them by trained apper
ception. The rest must be treated as moonshine
and taken no account of except perhaps in idle and
poetic revery. In this way crude experience grows
reasonable and appearance becomes knowledge of
reality.

The fundamental reason,, then, why we attribute
consciousness to natural bodies is that those bodies,
before they are conceived to be merely material,
are conceived to possess all the qualities which
our own consciousness possesses when we behold
them. Such a supposition is far from being a
paradox, since only this principle justifies us to
this day in believing in whatever we may decide
to believe in. The qualities attributed to reality
must be qualities found in experience, and if we
deny their presence in ourselves (e.g., in the case
of omniscience), that is only because the idea of
self, like that of matter, has already become
special and the region of ideals (in which omni
science lies) has been formed into a third sphere.
But before the idea of self is well constituted and
before the category of ideals has been conceived at
all, every ingredient ultimately assigned to those
two regions is attracted into the perceptual vortex
for which such qualities as pressure and motion
, supply a nucleus. The moving image is there
fore impregnated not only with secondary quali
ties colour, heat, etc. but with qualities which

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 143

we may call tertiary, such as pain, fear, joy,
malice, feebleness, expectancy. Sometimes these
tertiary qualities are attributed to the object in
their fulness and just as they are felt. Thus the
sun is not only bright and warm in the same way
as he is round, but by the same right he is also
happy, arrogant, ever-young, and all-seeing; for a
suggestion of these tertiary qualities runs through
us when we look at him, just as immediately as do
his warmth and light. The fact that these imag
inative suggestions are not constant does not im
pede the instant perception that they are actual,
and for crude experience whatever a thing pos
sesses in appearance it possesses indeed, no matter
how soon that quality may be lost again. The
moment when things have most numerous and best
defined tertiary qualities is accordingly, for crude
experience, the moment when they are most ade
quately manifested and when their inner essence
is best revealed; for it is then that they appear in
experience most splendidly arrayed and best
equipped for their eventual functions. The sun
is a better expression of all his ulterior effects
when he is conceived to be an arrogant and all-
seeing spirit than when he is stupidly felt to be
merely hot; so that the attentive and devout
observer, to whom those tertiary qualities are re
vealed, stands in the same relation to an ordinary
sensualist, who can feel only the sun s material
attributes, as the sensualist in turn stands in to
one born blind, who cannot add the sun s bright-

144 THE LIFE OF REASON

ness to its warmth except by faith in some hap
pier man s reported intuition. The mythologist
or poet, before science exists, is accordingly the
man of truest and most adequate vision. His per
suasion that he knows the heart and soul of things
is no fancy reached by artificial inference or
analogy but is a direct report of his own experi
ence and honest contemplation.
Tertiar More often, however, tertiary quali-

quaiities ties are somewhat transposed in pro-
transposed, jection, as sound in being lodged in the
bell is soon translated into sonority, made, that is,
into its own potentiality. In the same way pain-
fulness is translated into malice or wickedness,
terror into hate, and every felt tertiary quality into
whatever tertiary quality is in experience its more
quiescent or potential form. So religion, which
remains for the most part on the level of crude
experience, attributes to the gods not only happi
ness the object s direct tertiary quality but
goodness its tertiary quality transposed and made
potential; for goodness is that disposition which
is fruitful in happiness throughout imagined ex
perience. The devil, in like manner, is cruel and
wicked as well as tormented. Uncritical science
still attributes these transposed tertiary qualities
to nature; the mythical notion of force, for
instance, being a transposed sensation of effort.
In this case we may distinguish two stages or
degrees in the transposition : first, before we think
of our own pulling, we say the object itself pulls ;

DISCOVEEY OF FELLOW-MINDS 145

in the first transposition we say it pulls against
us, its pull is the counterpart or rival of ours but
it is still conceived in the same direct terms of
effort; and in the second transposition this in
termittent effort is made potential or slumbering
in what we call strength or force.

It is obvious that the feelings at-

tributed to other men are nothing but
tertiary quail- the tertiary qualities of their bodies.
tie . s * J e *~ j n beings of the same species, however,

these qualities are naturally exceed
ingly numerous, variable, and precise. Nature
has made man man s constant study. His
thought, from infancy to the drawing up of his
last will and testament, is busy about his neigh
bour. A smile makes a child happy; a caress, a
moment s sympathetic attention, wins a heart and
gives the friend s presence a voluminous and
poignant value. In youth all seems lost in losing
a friend, j For the tertiary values, the emotions
attached fo^ a given image, the moral effluence
emanating from it, pervade the whole present
world. The sense of union, though momentary,
is the same that later returns to the lover or the
mystic, when he feels he has plucked the heart of
life s mystery .and penetrated to the peaceful cen
tre of things. ) What the mystic beholds in his
ecstasy and loses in his moments of dryness, what
the lover pursues and adores, what the child cries
for when left alone, is much more a spirit, a per
son, a haunting mind, than a set of visual sensa-
VOL. I.10

146 THE LIFE OF REASON

tions; yet the visual sensations are connected in
extricably with that spirit, else the spirit would
not withdraw when the sensations failed. We are
not dealing with an articulate mind whose posses
sions are discriminated and distributed into a mas
tered world where everything has its department,
its special relations, its limited importance; we
are dealing with a mind all pulp, all confusion,
keenly sensitive to passing influences and reacting
on them massively and without reserve.

This mind is feeble, passionate, and ignorant.
Its sense for present spirit is no miracle of intelli
gence or of analogical reasoning ; on the contrary,
it betrays a vagueness natural to rudimentary con
sciousness. Those visual sensations suddenly cut
off cannot there be recognised for what they are.
The consequences which their present disappear
ance may have for subsequent experience are in
no wise foreseen or estimated, much less are any
inexperienced feelings invented and attached to
that retreating figure, otherwise a mere puppet.
What happens is that by the loss of an absorbing
stimulus the whole chaotic mind is thrown out of
gear; the child cries, the lover faints, the mystic
feels hell opening before him. All this is a pres
ent sensuous commotion, a derangement in an
actual dream. Yet just at this lowest plunge of
experience, in this drunkenness of the soul, does
the overwhelming reality and externality of the
other mind dawn upon us, Then we feel that we
are surrounded jnot fty-si blue sky or an earth

DISCOVEKY OF FELLOW-MINDS 147

known to geographers buj( by unutterable and most
personal hatreds and loves. For then we allow
the half-deciphered images of sense to drag behind
them every emotion they have awakened. We
endow each overmastering stimulus with all its
diffuse effects; and any dramatic potentiality that
our dream acts out under that high pressure
and crude experience is rich in dreams becomes
our notion of the life going on before us. We
cannot regard it as our own life, because it is not
felt to be a passion in our own body, but attaches
itself rather to images we see moving about in
the world; it is consequently, without hesitation,
called the life of those images, or those creatures
souls.

"Pathetic The pathetic fallacy is accordingly

fallacy " nor-v what originally peoples the imagined

malyetor- ,, ? ,./ * \.

fai- world. All the feelings aroused by

lacious. perceived things are merged in those

things and made to figure as the spiritual and in
visible part of their essence, a part, moreover,
quite as well known and as directly perceived as
their motions. To ask why such feelings are
objectified would be to betray a wholly sophis
ticated view of experience and its articulation.
They do not need to be objectified, seeing they
were objective from the beginning, inasmuch as
they pertain to objects and have never, any more
than those objects, been "subjectified" or localised
in the thinker s body, nor included in that train
of images which as a whole is known to have in

148 THE LIFE OF KEASON

that body its seat and thermometer. The ther
mometer for these passions is, on the contrary, the
body of another; and the little dream in us, the
quick dramatic suggestion which goes with our
perception of his motions, is our perception of his
thoughts.

A sense for alien thought is accordingly at its
inception a complete illusion. The thought is
one s own, it is associated with an image moving
in space, and is uncritically supposed to be a hid
den part of that image, a metaphysical significa
tion attached to its motion and actually existing
behind the scenes in the form of an unheard
soliloquy. A complete illusion this sense remains
in mythology, in animism, in the poetic forms of
love and religion. A better mastery of experience
will in such cases dispel those hasty conceits by
showing the fundamental divergence which at once
manifests itself between the course of phenomena
and the feelings associated with them. It will
appear beyond question that those feelings were
private fancies merged with observation in an un
digested experience. They indicated nothing in
the object but its power of arousing emotional and
playful reverberations in the mind. Criticism
will tend to clear the world of such poetic distor
tion; and what vestiges of it may linger will be
avowed fables, metaphors employed merely in con
ventional expression. In the end even poetic
power will forsake a discredited falsehood: the
poet himself will soon prefer to describe nature in

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 149

natural terms and to represent human emotions
in their pathetic humility, not extended beyond
their actual sphere nor fantastically uprooted from
their necessary soil and occasions. He will sing
the power of nature over the soul, the joys of the
soul in the bosom of nature, the beauty visible in
things, and the steady march of natural processes,
so rich in momentous incidents and collocations.
The precision of such a picture will accentuate its
majesty, as precision does in the poems of Lucre
tius and Dante, while its pathos and -dramatic
interest will be redoubled by its truth.
Case where it is A primary habit producing wide-
not a fallacy, spread illusions may in certain cases
become the source of rational knowledge. This
possibility will surprise no one who has studied
nature and life to any purpose. Nature and life
are tentative in all their processes, so that there
is nothing exceptional in the fact that, since in
crude experience image and emotion are inevitably
regarded as constituting a single event, this habit
should usually lead to childish absurdities, but
also, under speciaL-ycircumstances, to rational
insight and morality./ There is evidently one case
in which the pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, the
case in which the object observed happens to be an
animal similar to the observer and similarly
affected, as for instance when a flock or herd arc
swayed by panic fear. The emotion which each,
as he runs, attributes to the others is, as usual, the
emotion he feels himself; but this emotion, fear,

150 THE LIFE OF KEASON

is the same which in fact the others are then feel
ing. Their aspect thus becomes the recognised

- expression for the feeling which really accom
panies it. So in hand-to-hand fighting: the in
tention and passion which each imputes to the
other is what he himself feels ; but the imputation
is probably just, since pugnacity is a remarkably

* contagious and monotonous passion. It is awa
kened by the slightest hostile suggestion and is
greatly intensified by example and emulation;
those we fight against and those we figh^ with
arouse it concurrently and the universal battle-cry
that fills the air, and that each man instinctively
emits, is an adequate and exact symbol for what
is passing in all their souls.

Whenever, then, feeling is attributed to an ani
mal similar to the percipient and similarly em
ployed the attribution is mutual and correct.
Contagion and imitation are great causes of feel
ing, but in so far as they are its causes and set
the pathetic fallacy to work they forestall and
correct what is fallacious in that fallacy and turn
it into a vehicle of true and, as it were, miraculous
insight.
.. . Let the reader meditate for a

Knowledge

succeeds only moment upon the following point : to

by accident. ^ now rea ^y ^ j n a way ^ an i m p 0ss ible

pretension, because knowledge means significant
representation, discourse about an existence not
contained in the knowing thought, and different
in duration or locus from the ideas which repre-

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 151

sent it. But if knowledge does not possess its
object how can it intend it? And if knowledge
possesses its object, how can it be knowledge or
have any practical, prophetic, or retrospective
value? Consciousness is not knowledge unless
it indicates or signifies what actually it is not.
This transcendence is what gives knowledge its
cognitive and useful essence, its transitive func
tion and validity. In knowledge, therefore, there
must be some such thing as a justified illusion, an
irrational pretension by chance fulfilled, a chance
shot hitting the mark. For dead logic would stick
at solipsism; yet irrational life, as it stumbles
along from moment to moment, and multiplies
itself in a thousand centres, is somehow amenable
to logic and finds uses for the reason it breeds.

Now, in the relation of a natural being to simi
lar beings in the same habitat there is just the
occasion we require for introducing a miraculous
transcendence in knowledge, a leap out of solip
sism which, though not prompted by reason, will
find in reason a continual justification. For ter
tiary qualities are imputed to objects by psycho
logical or pathological necessity. Something not
visible in the object, something not possibly re
vealed by any future examination of that object,
is thus united with it, felt to be its core, its meta
physical truth. Tertiary qualities are emotions
or thoughts present in the observer and in his
rudimentary consciousness not yet connected with
their proper concomitants and antecedents, not yet

152 THE LIFE OF KEASON

relegated to his private mind, nor explained by
his personal endowment and situation. To take
these private feelings for the substance of other
beings is evidently a gross blunder ; yet this blun-
I der, without ceasing to be one in point of method,
ceases to be one in point of fact when the other
being happens to be similar in nature and situa
tion to the mythologist himself and therefore
actually possesses the very emotions and thoughts
which lie in the mythologist s bosom and are at
tributed by him to his fellow. Thus an imaginary
self-transcendence, a rash pretension to grasp an
independent reality and to know the unknowable,
may find itself accidentally rewarded. Imagina
tion will have drawn a prize in its lottery and the
1 pathological accidents of thought will have begot
ten knowledge and right reason. The inner and
unattainable core of other beings will have been
revealed to private intuition.

Limits of This miracle of insight, as it must

insight. seem to those who have not understood

its natural and accidental origin, extends only so
far as does the analogy between the object and the
instrument of perception. The gift of intuition
fails in proportion as the observer s bodily habit
differs from the habit and body observed. Mis
understanding begins with constitutional diver
gence and deteriorates rapidly into false imputa
tions and absurd myths. The limits of mutual
understanding coincide with the limits of similar
structure and common occupation, so that the dis-

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 153

tortion of insight begins very near home. It is
hard to understand the minds of children unless
we retain unusual plasticity and capacity to play;
men and women do not really understand each
other, what rules between them being not so much
sympathy as habitual trust, idealisation, or satire ;
foreigners minds are pure enigmas, and those at
tributed to animals are a grotesque compound of
^Esop and physiology. When we come to religion
the ineptitude of all the feelings attributed to
nature or the gods is so egregious that a sober
critic can look to such fables only for a pathetic
expression of human sentiment and need; while,
even apart from the gods, each religion itself is
quite unintelligible to infidels who have never fol
lowed its worship sympathetically or learned by
contagion the human meaning of its sanctions and
formulas. Hence the stupidity and want of in
sight commonly shown in what calls itself the his
tory of religions. We hear, for instance, that
Greek religion was frivolous, because its mystic
awe and momentous practical and poetic truths
escape the Christian historian accustomed to a
catechism and a religious morality; and similarly
Catholic piety seems to the Protestant an aesthetic
indulgence, a religion appealing to sense, because
such is the only emotion its externals can awaken
in him, unused as he is to a supernatural economy
reaching down into the incidents and affections of
daily life.

Language is an artificial means of establishing

154 THE LIFE OF KEASON

unanimity and transferring thought from one
mind to another. Every symbol or phrase, like
every gesture, throws the observer into an attitude
to which a certain idea corresponded in the
speaker ; to fall exactly into the speaker s attitude
is exactly to understand. Every impediment to
contagion and imitation in expression is an im
pediment to comprehension. For this reason lan
guage, like all art, becomes pale with years ; words
and figures of speech lose their contagious and
suggestive power; the feeling they once expressed
can no longer be restored by their repetition.
Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not
without a relative justification to be immortal,
becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible
hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies,
a learned education and an imaginative effort are
requisite to catch even a vestige of its original
force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Unsure the ebb and flood of thought,
The moon comes back, the spirit not.

Perception of There is, however, a wholly differ-
character. en t and far more positive method of
reading the mind, or what in a metaphorical sense
is called by that name. This method is to read
character. Any object with which we are familiar
teaches us to divine its habits; slight indications,
which we should be at a loss to enumerate sepa
rately, betray what changes are going on and
what promptings are simmering in the organism.

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 155

Hence the expression of a face or figure ; hence the
traces of habit and passion visible in a man and
that indescribable something about him which in
spires confidence or mistrust. The gift of read
ing character is partly instinctive, partly a result
of experience; it may amount to foresight and is
directed not upon consciousness but upon past or
eventual action. Habits and passions, however,
have metaphorical psychic names, names indicat
ing dispositions rather than particular acts (a dis
position being mythically represented as a sort of
wakeful and haunting genius waiting to whisper
suggestions in a man s ear). We may accord
ingly delude ourselves into imagining that a pose
or a manner which really indicates habit indicates
feeling instead. In truth the feeling involved, if
conceived at all, is conceived most vaguely, and is
only a sort of reverberation or penumbra sur
rounding the pictured activities,
conduct It is a mark of the connoisseur to

sdousn es C sigI be able t0 r6ad character and h *bit and

nored. to divine at a glance all a creature s

potentialities. This sort of penetration charac
terises the man with an eye for horse-flesh, the
dog-fancier, and men and women of the world.
It guides the born leader in the judgments he in
stinctively passes on his subordinates and enemies ;
it distinguishes every good judge of human affairs
or of natural phenomena, who is quick to detect
small but telling indications of events past or
brewing. As the weather-prophet reads the

156 THE LIFE OF REASON

heavens so the man of experience reads other men.
Nothing concerns him less than their conscious
ness ; he can allow that to run itself off when he is
sure of their temper and habits. A great master
of affairs is usually unsympathetic. His observa
tion is not in the least dramatic or dreamful, he
does not yield himself to animal contagion or re-
enact other people s inward experience. He is
too busy for that, and too intent on his own pur
poses. His observation, on the contrary, is
straight calculation and inference, and it some
times reaches truths about people s character and
destiny which they themselves are very far from
divining. Such apprehension is masterful and
odious to weaklings, who think they know them
selves because they indulge in copious soliloquy
(which is the discourse of brutes and madmen),
but who really know nothing of their own capacity,
situation, or fate.

If Rousseau, for instance, after writing those
Confessions in which candour and ignorance of self
are equally conspicuous, had heard some intelli
gent friend, like Hume, draw up in a few words
an account of their author s true and contemptible
character, he would have been loud in protesta
tions that no such ignoble characteristics existed
in his eloquent consciousness ; and they might not
have existed there, because his consciousness was
a histrionic thing, and as imperfect an expression
of his own nature as of man s. When the mind
is irrational no practical purpose is served by stop-

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 157

ping to understand it, because such a mind is
irrelevant to practice, and the principles that guide
the man s practice can be as well understood by
eliminating his mind altogether. So a wise gov
ernor ignores his subjects religion or concerns
himself only with its economic and temperamental
aspects; if the real forces that control life are
understood, the symbols that represent those
forces in the mind may be disregarded. But such
a government, like that of the British in India, is
more practical than sympathetic. While wise men
may endure it for the sake of their material in
terests, they will never love it for itself. There
is nothing sweeter than to be sympathised with,
while nothing requires a rarer intellectual hero
ism than willingness to see one s equation written
out.

Consciousness Nevertheless this same algebraic
untrustworthy. sense f or character plays a large part
in human friendship. A chief element in friend
ship is trust, and trust is not to be acquired by
reproducing consciousness but only by penetrating
to the constitutional instincts which, in determin
ing action and habit, determine consciousness as
well. Fidelity is not a property of ideas. It is
a virtue possessed pre-eminently by nature, from
the animals to the seasons and the stars. But
fidelity gives friendship its deepest sanctity, and
the respect we have for a man, for his force, abil
ity, constancy, and dignity, is no sentiment evoked
by his floating thoughts but an assurance founded

158 THE LIFE OF KEASON

\

on our own observation that his conduct and char
acter are to be counted upon.; Smartness and
vivacity, much emotion and niany conceits, are
obstacles both to fidelity and to merit. There is
n. high worth in rightly constituted natures inde
pendent of incidental consciousness. It consists
in that ingrained virtue which under given cir
cumstances would insure the noblest action and
with that action, of course, the noblest sentiments
and ideas; ideas which would arise spontaneously
and would make more account of their objects
than of themselves.

Metaphorical The "expression of habit in psychic
mind. metaphors is a procedure known also

to theology. Whenever natural or moral law is
declared to reveal the divine mind, this mind is
a set of formal or ethical principles rather than
an imagined consciousness, re-enacted dramati
cally. What is conceived is the god s operation,
not his emotions. In this way God s goodness
becomes a symbol for the advantages of life, his
wrath a symbol for its dangers, his command
ments a symbol for its laws. The deity spoken
of by the Stoics had exclusively this symbolic char
acter; it could be called a city dear City of Zeus
as readily as an intelligence. And that intelli
gence which ancient and ingenuous philosophers
said they saw in the world was always intelligence
in this algebraic sense, it was intelligible order.
Nor did the Hebrew prophets, in their emphatic
political philosophy, seem to mean much more by

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 159

Jehovah than a moral order, a principle giving
vice and virtue their appropriate fruits. ""
Summary. True society, then, is limited to

similar beings living similar lives and enabled by
the contagion of their common habits and arts to
attribute to one another, each out of his own ex
perience, what the other actually endures. A
fresh thought may be communicated to one who
has never had it before, but only when the speaker /
so dominates the auditor s mind by the instru-j
mentalities he brings to bear upon it that he com-f
pels that mind to reproduce his experience.
Analogy between actions and bodies is accordingly
the only test of valid inference regarding the ex
istence or character of conceived minds; but this
eventual test is far from being the source of such
a conception. Its source is not inference at all
but direct emotion and the pathetic fallacy. In
the beginning, as in the end, what is attributed to
others is something directly felt, a dream dreamed
through and dramatically enacted, but uncritically
attributed to the object by whose motions it is sug
gested and controlled. In a single case, however,
tertiary qualities happen to correspond to an ex
perience actually animating the object to which,
they are assigned. This is the case in which the
object is a body similar in structure and action t(
the percipient himself, who assigns to that body
passion he has caught by contagion from it anu
by imitation of its actual attitude. Such are the
conditions of intelligible expression and true com-

160 THE LIFE OF REASON

munion; beyond these limits nothing is possible
save myth and metaphor, or the algebraic desig
nation of observed habits under the name of moral
dispositions.

CHAPTER VII

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE

So-called ab- Ideas ^ material objects ordinarily
stract quail- absorb the human mind, and their
ties primary. p reva i ence nas \ e ^ to the rash supposi
tion that ideas of all other kinds are posterior to
physical ideas and drawn from the latter by a proc
ess of abstraction. The table, people said, was a
particular and single reality ; its colour, form, and
material were parts of its integral nature, quali
ties which might be attended to separately, per
haps, but which actually existed only in the table
itself. Colour, form, and material were therefore
abstract elements. They might come before the
mind separately and be contrasted objects of at
tention, but they were incapable of existing in
nature except together, in the concrete reality
called a particular thing. Moreover, as the same
colour, shape, or substance might be found in vari
ous tables, these abstract qualities were thought
to be general qualities as well ; they were universal
terms which might be predicated of many indi
vidual things. A contrast could then be drawn
between these qualities or ideas, which the mind
may envisage, and the concrete reality existing
VOL. L-ll 161

162 THE LIFE OF REASON

beyond. Thus philosophy could reach the famil
iar maxim of Aristotle that the particular alone
exists in nature and the general alone in the mind.
Such language expresses correctly enough a
secondary conventional stage of conception, but it
ignores the primary fictions on which convention
itself must rest. Individual physical objects must
be discovered before abstractions can be made from
their conceived nature; the bird must be caught
before it is plucked. To discover a physical object
is to pack in the same part of space, and fuse in
one complex body, primary data like coloured form
General and tangible surface. Intelligence,

tTparticu^l observin g these sensible qualities to
things. evolve together, and to be controlled at

once by external forces, or by one s own voluntary
motions, identifies them in their operation
although they remain for ever distinct in their sen
sible character. A physical object is accordingly
conceived by fusing or interlacing spatial quali
ties, in a manner helpful to practical intelligence.
It is a far higher and remoter thing than the ele
ments it is compacted of and that suggest it ; what
habits of appearance and disappearance the latter
may have, the object reduces to permanent and
calculable principles. It is altogether erroneous,
therefore, to view all object s sensible qualities as
abstractions from it, seeing they are its original
and component elements; nor can the sensible
qualities be viewed as generic notions arising by
comparison of several concrete objects, seeing that

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE 163

these concretions would never have been made or
thought to be permanent, did they not express
observed variations and recurrences in the sensible
qualities immediately perceived and already rec
ognised in their recurrence. These are them
selves the true particulars. They are the first
objects discriminated in attention and projected
against the background of consciousness.

The immediate continuum may be traversed and
mapped by two different methods. The prior one,
because it is so very primitive and rudimentary,
and so much a condition of all mental discourse,
is usually ignored in psychology. The secondary
method, by which external things are discovered,
has received more attention. The latter consists
in the fact that when several disparate sensations,
having become recognisable in their repetitions,
are observed to come and go together, or in fixed
relation to some voluntary operation on the ob
server s part, they may be associated by contiguity
and merged in one portion of perceived space.
Those having, like sensations of touch and sight,
an essentially spatial character, may easily be
superposed ; the surface I see and that I touch may
be identified by being presented together and being
found to undergo simultaneous variations and to
maintain common relations to other perceptions.
Thus I may come to attribute to a single object,
the term of an intellectual synthesis and ideal in
tention, my experiences through all the senses
within a certain field of association, defined by its

164 THE LIFE OF KEASON

practical relations. That ideal object is thereby
endowed with as many qualities and powers as I
had associable sensations of which to make it up.
This object is a concretion of my perceptions in
space, so that the redness, hardness, sweetness, and
roundness of the apple are all fused together in
my practical regard and given one local habita
tion and one name.

Universal This kind of synthesis, this super-

are concre- position and mixture of images into

tions in

discourse. notions of physical objects, is not, how
ever, the only kind to which perceptions are sub
ject. They fall together by virtue of their quali
tative identity even before their spatial superposi
tion ; for in order to be known as repeatedly simul
taneous, and associable by contiguity, they must
be associated by similarity and known as indi
vidually repeated. The various recurrences of a
sensation must be recognised as recurrences, and
this implies the collection of sensations into classes
of similars and the apperception of a common
nature in several data. Now the more frequent a
perception is the harder it will be to discriminate in
memory its past occurrences from one another, and
yet the more readily will its present recurrence be
recognised as familiar. The perception in sense
will consequently be received as a repetition not of
any single earlier sensation but of a familiar and
, generic experience. This experience, a spontaneous
reconstruction based on all previous sensations of
that kind, will be the one habitual idea with which

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE 165

recurring sensations will be henceforth identified.
Such a living concretion of similars succeeding
one another in time, is the idea of a nature or
quality, the universal falsely supposed to be an
abstraction from physical objects, which in truth
are conceived by putting together these very ideas
into a spatial and permanent system.

Here we have, if I am not mistaken, the origin
of the two terms most prominent in human knowl
edge, ideas and things. Two methods of concep
tion divide our attention in common life; science
and philosophy develop both, although often with
an unjustifiable bias in favour of one or the other.
They are nothing but the old principles of Aris
totelian psychology, association by similarity and
association by contiguity. Only now, after logi
cians have exhausted their ingenuity in criticising
them and psychologists in applying them, we may
go back of the traditional position and apply the
ancient principles at a deeper stage of mental life,
similar reac- Association by similarity is a fusion
tions, merged of impressions merging what is com-

orpro?uc- mon in tnem > interchanging what is
tion, yield an peculiar, and cancelling in the end
what is incompatible; so that any ex
citement reaching that centre revives one generic
reaction which yields the idea. These concrete
generalities are actual feelings, the first terms in
mental discourse, the first distinguishable particu
lars in knowledge, and the first bearers of names.
Intellectual dominion of the conscious stream

166 THE LIFE OP REASON

begins with the act of recognising these pervasive
entities" which having character and ideal per
manence can furnish common points of reference
for different moments of discourse. Save for ideas
no perception could have significance, or acquire
that indicative force which we call knowledge.
For it would refer to nothing to which another
perception might also have referred; and so long
as perceptions have no common reference, so long
as successive moments do not enrich by their con
tributions the same object of thought, evidently
experience, in the pregnant sense of the word, is
impossible. No fund of valid ideas, no wisdom,
could in that case be acquired by living,
ideas are Ideas, although their material is of

ideal. course sensuous, are not sensations

nor perceptions nor objects of any possible im
mediate experience : they kre creatures of intelli
gence, goals of thought,- ideal terms which cogi
tation and action circle about. As the centre
of mass is a body, while it may by chance
coincide with one or another of its atoms, is
no atom itself and no material constituent of
the bulk that obeys its motion, so an idea, the
centre of mass of a certain mental system, is no
material fragment of that system, /but an ideal
term of reference and signification by allegiance
to which the details of consciousness first become
parts of a system and of a thought. An idea is
an ideal. It represents a functional relation in
the diffuse existences to which it gives a name and

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE 167

f

a rational value. An idea is an expression of life,
and shares with life that transitive and elusive
nature which defies definition by mere enumera
tion of its materials, j The peculiarity of life is
that it lives ; and /thought also,, when living, passes
out of itself and directs itself on the ideal, on the
eventual. It is an activity. Activity does not
consist in velocity of change but in constancy of
purpose; in the conspiracy of many moments and
many processes toward one ideal harmony and
one concomitant ideal result. The most rudiment
ary apperception, recognition, or expectation, is
already a case of representative cognition, of tran
sitive thought resting in a permanent essence.
Memory is an obvious case of the same thing; for
the past, in its truth, is a system of experiences
in relation, a system now non-existent and never,
as a system, itself experienced, yet confronted in
retrospect and made the ideal object and standard
for all historical thinking.

So called ab These arrested and recognisable
stractions ideas, concretions of similars succeed-
complete facts. ing Qne another in time ^ are not ab _

stractions; but they may come to be regarded as
such after the other kind of concretions in experi
ence, concretions of superposed perceptions in
space, have become the leading objects of atten
tion. The sensuous material for both concretions
is the same; the perception which, recurring in
different objects otherwise not retained in memory
gives the idea of roundness, is the same percep-

168 THE LIFE OF REASON

tion which helps to constitute the spatial concre
tion called the sun. Soundness may therefore be
carelessly called an abstraction from the real
object " sun " ; whereas the peculiar optical and
muscular feelings by which the sense of roundness
is constituted probably feelings of gyration and
perpetual unbroken movement are much earlier
than any solar observations; they are a self-suffi
cing element in experience which, by repetition in
various accidental contests, has come to be recog
nised and named, and to be a characteristic by
virtue of which more complex objects can be dis
tinguished and defined. The idea of the sun is
a much later product, and the real sun is so far
from being an original datum from which round
ness is abstracted, that it is an ulterior and quite
ideal construction, a spatial concretion into which
the logical concretion roundness enters as a prior
and independent factor. Roundness may be felt
in the dark, by a mere suggestion of motion, and
is a complete experience in itself. When this rec
ognisable experience happens to be associated by
contiguity with other recognisable experiences of
heat, light, height, and yellowness, and these vari
ous independent objects are projected into the
same portion of a real space ; then a concretion
occurs, and these ideas being recognised in that re
gion and finding a momentary embodiment there,
become the qualities of a thing.

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind,
more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea,

CONCKETIONS IN DISCOURSE 169

since ideas arise, so to speak, by the mind s in
ertia and conceptions of things by its activity.
Ideas are niental sediment ; "conceived

Things con
cretions of things are mental growths. A concre-
concretions. ^ Qn n dig cour s e occurs by repetition

and mere emphasis on a datum, but a concretion
in existence requires a synthesis of disparate ele
ments and relations. An idea is nothing but a
sensation apperceived and rendered cognitive, so"
that it envisages its own recognised character af
its object and ideal: yellowness is only some sen
sation of yellow raised to the cognitive power and
employed as the symbol for its own specific essence.
It is consequently capable of entering as a term
into rational discourse and of becoming the sub
ject or predicate of propositions eternally valid:
A thing, on the contrary, is discovered only when
the order and grouping of such recurring essences
can be observed, and when various themes and
strains of experience are woven together into elab
orate progressive harmonies. When consciousness
first becomes cognitive it frames ideas; but when
it becomes cognitive of. causes, that is, when it
becomes practical, it perceives things.

Concretions of qualities recurrent in time and
concretions of qualities associated in existence are
alike involved in daily life and inextricably in
grown into the structure of reason. In conscious
ness and for logic, association by similarity, with
its aggregations and identifications of recurrences
in time, is fundamental rather than association

170 THE LIFE OF REASON

by contiguity and its existential syntheses; for
recognition identifies similars perceived in suc
cession, and without recognition of

Ideas prior in

the order of similars there could be no known per-

knowiedge, gigtence of phenomena. But physio-
things in the " J
order of logically and for the observer associa
tion by contiguity comes first. All
instinct without which there would be no fixity
or recurrence in ideation makes movement fol
low impression in an immediate way which for
consciousness becomes a mere juxtaposition of sen
sations, a juxtaposition which it can neither ex
plain nor avoid. Yet this juxtaposition, in which
pleasure, pain, and striving are prominent factors,
. is the chief stimulus to attention and spreads
before the mind that moving and variegated field
in which it learns to make its first observations.
Facts the burdens of successive moments are
all associated by contiguity, from the first facts
of perception and passion to the last facts of fate
and conscience. We undergo events, we grow into
character, by the subterraneous working of irra
tional forces that make their incalculable irrup
tions into life none the less wonderfully in the
revelations of a man s heart to himself than in the
cataclysms of the world around him. Nature s
placid procedure, to which we yield so willingly in
times of prosperity, is a concatenation of states
which can only be understood when it is made its
own standard and law. A sort of philosophy with
out wisdom may seek to subjugate this natural life,

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE 171

this blind budding of existence, to some logical or
moral necessity; but this very attempt remains,
perhaps, the most striking monument to that irra
tional fatality that rules affairs, a monument which
reason itself is compelled to raise with unsus
pected irony.

Reliance on external perception, constant ap
pals to concrete fact and physical sanctions, .have
always led the mass of reasonable men to magnify
Aristotle s concretions in existence and belittle
compromise, concretions in discourse. They are too
clever, as they feel, to mistake words for things.
The most authoritative thinker on this subject,
because the most mature, Aristotle himself, taught
that things had reality, individuality, indepen
dence, and were the outer cause of perception,
while general ideas, products of association by
similarity, existed only in the mind. The pub
lic, pleased at its ability to understand this doc
trine and overlooking the more incisive part of
the philosopher s teaching, could go home com
forted and believing that material things were
primary and perfect entities, while ideas were only
abstractions, effects those realities produced on our
incapable minds. Aristotle, however, had a juster
view of general concepts and made in the end the
- whole material universe gravitate around them
and feel their influence, though in a metaphysical
and magic fashion to which a more advanced
natural science need no longer appeal. While in
the shock of life man was always coming upon the

172 THE LIFE OF REASON

accidental, in the quiet of reflection he could not
but recast everything in ideal moulds and retain
nothing but eternal natures and intelligible rela
tions. Aristotle conceived that while the origin

of knowledge lay in the impact of matter upon

sense its goal was the comprehension of essences,
and that while man was involved by his animal
nature in the accidents of experience he was also

by virtue of his rationality a participator in eternal
truth. A substantial justice was thus done both
to the conditions and to the functions of human
life, although, for want of a natural history in
spired by mechanical ideas, this dualism remained
somewhat baffling and incomprehensible in its
basis. Aristotle, being a true philosopher and pu-

I !/j pil of experience, preferred incoherence to par-
1 1 tiality.

Em iricai bias Active life and the philosophy that
in favour of borrows its concepts from practice has
contiguity. ^ ug ^-^ a g rea em phasis on asso
ciation by contiguity. Hobbes and Locke made
knowledge of this kind the only knowledge of
reality, while recognising it to be quite empirical,
tentative, and problematical. It was a kind of
acquaintance with fact that increased with years
and brought the mind into harmony with some
thing initially alien to it. Besides this practical
knowledge or prudence there was a sort of verbal
and merely ideal knowledge, a knowledge of the
meaning and relation of abstract terms. In
mathematics and logic we might carry out long

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE 173

trains of abstracted thought and analyse and
develop our imaginations ad infinitum. These
speculations, however, were in the air or what for
these philosophers is much the same thing in the
mind; their applicability and their relevance to
practical life and to objects given in perception
remained quite problematical. A self-developing
science, a synthetic science a priori, had a value
entirely hypothetical and provisional; its prac
tical truth depended on the verification of its re
sults in some eventual sensible experience. Asso
ciation was invoked to explain the adjustment of
ideation to the order of external perception. As
sociation, by which association by contiguity was
generally understood, thus became the battle-cry
of empiricism; if association by similarity had
been equally in mind, the philosophy of pregnant
reason could also have adopted the principle for
its own. But logicians and mathematicians nat
urally neglect the psychology of their own proc
esses and, accustomed as they are to an irrespon
sible and constructive use of the intellect, regard
as a confused nd uninspired intruder the critic
Who, by a retrospective and naturalistic method,
tries to give them a little knowledge of them
selves.

Rational ideas must arise somehow in the mind,
and since they are not meant to be without ap-
lication to the world of experience, it is interest
ing to discover the point of contact between the
two and the nature of their interdependence.

174 THE LIFE OF EEASON

This would have been found in the mind s initial
capacity to frame objects of two sorts, those com
pacted of sensations that are persistently similar,
Artificial an( ^ * nose compacted of sensations that
divorce of logic are momentarily fused. In empirical
from practice, philosophy the applicability of logic

". and mathematics remains a miracle or becomes
a misinterpretation : a miracle if the process of
nature independently follows the inward elabora
tion of human ideas; a misinterpretation if the
bias of intelligence imposes a priori upon reality
a character and order not inherent in it. The
mistake of empiricists among which Kant is in
this respect to be numbered which enabled them
to disregard this difficulty, was that they admitted,

beside rational thinking, another instinctive kind
of wisdom by which men could live, a wisdom the
Englishmen called experience and the Germans
practical reason, spirit, or will. The intellectual
sciences could be allowed to spin themselves out in
abstracted liberty while man practised his illogi-

cal and inspired art of life.

Here we observe a certain elementary crudity
or barbarism which the human spirit often betrays
when it is deeply stirred. Not only are chance
and divination welcomed into the world but they
are reverenced all the more, like the wind and fire
of idolaters, precisely for not being amenable to

, the petty rules of human reason. In truth, how
ever, the English duality between prudence and
science is no more fundamental than the German

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE 175

duality between reason and understanding.* The
true contrast is between impulse and reflection,
instinct and intelligence. When men feel the
primordial authority of the animal in them and
have little respect for a glimmering reason which
they suspect to be secondary but cannot discern
to be ultimate, they readily imagine they are
appealing to something higher than intelligence
when in reality they are falling back on something
deeper and lower. The rudimentary seems to
them at such moments divine; and if they con
ceive a Life of Reason at all they despise it as a
mass of artifices and conventions. Reason is
indeed not indispensable to life, nor needful if liv
ing anyhow be the sole and indeterminate aim;

as the existence of animals and of most men suffi-

t

ciently proves. In so far as man is not a rational
being and does not live in and by the mind, in so
far as his chance volitions and dreamful ideas roll
by without mutual representation or adjustment,
in so far as his body takes the lead and even his
galvanised action is a form of passivity, we may
truly say that his life is not intellectual and not

* This distinction, in one sense, is Platonic : but Plato s
Reason was distinguished from understanding (which dealt
with phenomenal experience) because it was a moral faculty
defining those values and meanings which in Platonic nomen
clature took the title of reality. The German Reason was
only imagination, substituting a dialectical or poetic history
of the world for its natural development. German idealism,
accordingly, was not, like Plato s, a moral philosophy hypofl-
tasised but a false physics adored.

176 THE LIFE OF SEASON

dependent on the application of general concepts
to experience ; for he lives by instinct.

The Life of Reason, the comprehension of causes
/and pursuit of aims., begins precisely where instinc
tive operation ceases to be merely such by becom-

. Their mutual in g Conscious of its purposes and rep-
involution, resentative of its conditions. Logical
forms of thought impregnate and constitute practi
cal intellect. The shock of experience can indeed
correct, disappoint,, or inhibit rational expectation,
but it cannot take its place. The very first les
son that experience should again teach us after our
. disappointment would be a rebirth of reason in the
soul. Reason has the indomitable persistence of
all natural tendencies; it returns to the attack as
waves beat on the shore. To observe its defeat is
already to give it a new embodiment. Prudence
itself is a vague science, and science, when it con
tains real knowledge, is but a clarified prudence,
a description of experience and a guide to life.
Speculative reason, if it is not also practical, is
not reason at all. Propositions irrelevant to ex
perience may be correct in form, the method they
are reached by may parody scientific method, but
they cannot be true in substance, because they refer
to nothing. Like music, they have no object.
They merely flow, and please those whose unat
tached sensibility they somehow flatter.

Hume, in this respect more radical and satis
factory than Kant himself, saw with perfect clear
ness that reason was an ideal expression of in-

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE 177

stinct, and that consequently no rational spheres
could exist other than the mathematical and the
empirical, and that what is not a datum must cer
tainly be a construction. In establishing his
" tendencies to feign " at the basis of intelligence,
and in confessing that he yielded to them himself
no less in his criticism of human nature than in
his practical life, he admitted the involution of
reason that unintelligible instinct in all the
observations and maxims vouchsafed to an empiri
cist or to a man. He veiled his doctrine, however,
in a somewhat unfair and satirical nomenclature,
and he has paid the price of that indulgence
in personal humour by incurring the immortal
hatred of sentimentalists who are too much
scandalised by his tone ever to understand his
principles.

If the common mistake in empiricism is not to
see the omnipresence of reason in thought, the
mistake of rationalism is not to admit its varia
bility and dependence, not to understand its
Rationalistic natural life. Parmenides was the
suicide. Adam of that race, and first tasted the

deceptive kind of knowledge which, promising to
make man God, banishes him from the paradise
of experience. His sin has been transmitted to
his descendants, though hardly in its magnificent
and simple enormity. " The whole is one,"
Xenophanes had cried, gazing into heaven; and
that same sense of a permeating identity, trans
lated into rigid and logical terms, brought his
VOL. L 12

178 THE LIFE OF EEASON

sublime disciple to the conviction that an indis
tinguishable immutable substance was omnipres
ent in the world. Parmenides carried association
by similarity to such lengths that he arrived at
the idea of what alone is similar in everything,
viz., the fact that it is. Being exists, and nothing
else does; whereby every relation and variation
in experience is reduced to a negligible illusion,
and reason loses its function at the moment of
asserting its absolute authority. Notable lesson,
taught us like so many others by the first experi
ments of the Greek mind, in its freedom and in
sight, a mind led quickly by noble self-confidence
to the ultimate goals of thought.

Such a pitch of heroism and abstraction has
not been reached by any rationalist since. No one
else has been willing to ignore entirely all the
data and constructions of experience, save the
highest concept reached by assimilations in that
experience; no one else has been willing to de
molish all the scaffolding and all the stones of his
edifice, hoping still to retain the sublime symbol
which he had planted on the summit. Yet all
rationalists have longed to demolish or to degrade
some part of the substructure, like those Gothic
architects who wished to hang the vaults of their
churches upon the slenderest possible supports,
abolishing and turning into painted crystal all the
dead walls of the building. So experience and its
crowning conceptions were to rest wholly on a
skeleton of general natures, physical forces being

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE 179

assimilated to logical terms, and concepts gained
by identification of similars taking the place of
those gained by grouping disparate things in their
historical conjunctions. These contiguous sensa
tions, which occasionally exemplify the logical
contrasts in ideas and give them incidental exist
ence, were either ignored altogether and dismissed
as unmeaning, or admitted merely as illusions.
The eye was to be trained to pass from that parti
coloured chaos to the firm lines and permanent
divisions that were supposed to sustain it and
frame it in.

Eationalism is a kind of builder s bias which
the impartial public cannot share; for the dead
walls and glass screens which may have no
function in supporting the roof are yet as
needful as the roof itself to shelter and beauty.
So the incidental filling of experience which re
mains unclassified under logical categories retains
all its primary reality and importance. The out
lines of it emphasised by logic, though they may
be the essential vehicle of our most soaring
thoughts, are only a method and a style of archi
tecture. They neither absorb the whole material
of life nor monopolise its values. And as each
material imposes upon the builder s ingenuity a
different type of construction, and stone, wood,
and iron must be treated on different structural
principles, so logical methods of comprehension,
spontaneous though they be in their mental origin,
must prove themselves fitted to the natural order

180 THE LIFE OF KEASON

and affinity of the facts.* Nor is there in this
necessity any violence to the spontaneity of reason :
for reason also has manifold forms, and the acci
dents of experience are more than matched in
variety by the multiplicity of categories. Here
one principle of order and there another shoots
into the mind, which breeds more genera and spe
cies than the most fertile terrestrial slime can
breed individuals.
Complement- Language, then, with the logic im-

ary character bedded in it ig a repository of terms
of essence and *

existence. formed by identifying successive per
ceptions, as the external world is a repository of
objects conceived by superposing perceptions that
exist together. Being formed on different prin
ciples these two orders of conception the logical

* This natural order and affinity is something imputed to
the ultimate object of thought the reality by the last act of
judgment assuming its own truth. It is, of course, not
observable by consciousness before the first experiment in
comprehension has been made ; the act of comprehension
which first imposes on the sensuous material some subjective
category is the first to arrive at the notion of an objective
order. The historian, however, has a well-tried and mature
conception of the natural order arrived at after many such
ezperiments in comprehension. From the vantage-ground
- of this latest hypothesis, he surveys the attempts others have
made to understand events and compares them with the ob
jective order which he believes himself to have discovered.
This observation is made here lest the reader should confuse
the natural order, imagined to exist before any application
of human categories, with the last conception of that order
attained by the philosopher. The latter is but faith, the
former is faith s ideal object.

CONGESTIONS IN DISCOURSE 181

and the physical do not coincide, and the attempt
to fuse them into one system of demonstrable
reality or moral physics is doomed to failure by
the very nature of the terms compared. When the
Eleatics proved the impossibility i.e., the inex-
pressibility of motion,, or when Kant and his fol
lowers proved the unreal character of all objects
of experience and of all natural knowledge, their
task was made easy by the native diversity
between the concretions in existence which were
the object of their thought and the concretions in
discourse which were its measure. The two do
not fit; and intrenched as these philosophers were
in the forms of logic they compelled themselves
to reject as unthinkable everything not fully ex
pressible in those particular forms. Thus they
took their revenge upon the vulgar who, being busy
chiefly with material things and dwelling in an
atmosphere of sensuous images, call unreal and
abstract every product of logical construction
or reflective analysis. These logical products,
however, are not really abstract, but, as we have
seen, concretions arrived at by a different method
than that which results in material conception?.
Whereas the conception of a thing is a local con
glomerate of several simultaneous sensations, log
ical entity is a homogeneous revival in memory
of similar sensations temporally distinct.

Thus the many armed \vith prejudice and the
few armed with logic fight an eternal battle,
the logician charging the physical world with

THE LIFE OF KEASON

4

unintelligibility and the man of common-sense
charging the logical world with abstractness and
unreality. The former view is the more profound,
since association by similarity is the more elemen
tary and gives constancy to meanings; while the
latter view is the more practical, since association
by contiguity alone informs the mind about the
mechanical sequence of its own experience.
Neither principle can be dispensed with, and each
errs only in denouncing the other and wishing to
be omnivorous, as if on the one hand logic could
make anybody understand the history of events and
the conjunction of objects, or on the other hand
as if cognitive and moral processes could have any
, other terms than constant and ideal natures. The
i n&mable essence of things or the standard of val-
I ues must always be an ideal figment; existence
must always be an empirical fact. The former
remains always remote from natural existence and
the latter irreducible to a logical principle.*

* For the sake of simplicity only such ideas as precede
conceptions of things have been mentioned here. After
things are discovered, however, they may be used .as terms
in a second ideal synthesis and a concretion in discourse on
a higher plane may be composed out of sustained concre
tions in existence. Proper names are such secondary con
cretions in discourse. " Venice " is a term covering many
successive aspects and conditions, not distinguished in fancy,
belonging to an object existing continuously in space and
time. Each of these states of Venice constitutes a natural
object, a concretion in existence, and is again analysable
into a mass of fused but recognisable qualities light,
motion, beauty each of which was an original concretion in

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE 183

discourse, a primordial term in experience. A quality is
recognised by its own idea or permanent nature, a thing by
its constituent qualities, and an embodied spirit by fusion
into an ideal essence of the constant characters possessed by
a thing. To raise natural objects into historic entities it is
necessary to repeat upon a higher plane that concretion in
discourse by which sensations were raised to ideas. When
familiar objects attain this ideal character they have become
poetical and achieved a sort of personality. They then
possess a spiritual status. Thus sensuous experience is
solidified into logical terms, these into ideas of things, and
these, recast and smelted again in imagination, into forms of
spirit.

CHAPTEE VIII

ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS

Moral tone of Those who look back upon the his-

r^edTrom" ^ OT ^ ^ pi n i n f r m & n y centuries
their logical commonly feel, by a vague but pro-
principle, found instinct, that certain conse
crated doctrines have an inherent dignity and
spirituality, while other speculative tendencies and
other vocabularies seem wedded to all that is
ignoble and shallow. So fundamental is this
moral tone in philosophy that people are usually
more firmly convinced that their opinions are
precious than that they are true. They may avow,
in reflective moments, that they may be in
error, seeing that thinkers of no less repute
have maintained opposite opinions, but they are
commonly absolutely sure that if their own views
could be generally accepted, it would be a boon
to mankind, that in fact the moral interests of
the race are bound up, not with discovering what
may chance to be true, but with discovering the
truth to have a particular complexion. This pre
dominant trust in moral judgments is in some
cases conscious and avowed, so that philosophers
invite the world to embrace tenets for which no
184

VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS 185

evidence is offered but that they chime in with
current aspirations or traditional bias. Thus the
substance of things hoped for becomes, even in
philosophy, the evidence of things not seen.

Such faith is indeed profoundly human and has
accompanied the mind in all its gropings and dis
coveries; preference being the primary principle
of discrimination and attention. Reason in her
earliest manifestations already discovered her affin
ities and incapacities, and loaded the ideas she
framed with friendliness or hostility. It is not
strange that her latest constructions should inherit
this relation to the will ; and we shall see that the
moral tone and affinity of metaphysical systems
corresponds exactly with the primary function
belonging to that type of idea on which they are
based. Idealistic systems, still cultivating con-
cretions in discourse, study the first conditions of
knowledge and the last interests of life; material
istic systems, still emphasising concretions in ex
istence, describe causal relations, and the habits of
nature. Thus the spiritual value of various philos
ophies rests in the last instance on the kind of
good which originally attached the mind to that
habit and plane of ideation.

We have said that perceptions must be recog
nised before they can be associated by contiguity,
and that consequently the fusion of temporally
diffused experiences must precede their local
fusion into material objects. It might be urged
in opposition to this statement that concrete

186 THE LIFE OF REASON

objects can be recognised in practice before their ^
general qualities have been distinguished in dis-
concretions course. Eecognition may be instinct- j
in discourse [y Qy that is, based on the repetition of /
1 reaction or emotion, rather than

re-

actions. O n any memory of a former occasion

on which the same perception occurred. Such an
objection seems to be well grounded, for it is in
stinctive adjustments and suggested action that
give cognitive value to sensation and endow it
with that transitive force which makes it con
sciously representative of what is past, future, or
absent. If practical instinct did not stretch what
is given into what is meant, reason could never
recognise the datum for a copy of an ideal object.
This description of the case involves an appli
cation or extension of our theory rather than an
argument against it. For where recognition is
instinctive and a familiar action is performed with
absent-minded confidence and without attend
ing to the indications that justify that action,
there is in an eminent degree a qualitative con
cretion in experience. Present impressions are
merged so completely in structural survivals of
the past that instead of arousing any ideas dis
tinct enough to be objectified they merely stimu
late the inner sense, remain imbedded in the gen
eral feeling of motion or life, and constitute in
fact a heightened sentiment of pure vitality and
idealism freedom. For the lowest and vaguest
rudimentary. O f concretions in discourse are the

VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS 187

ideas of self and of an embosoming external being,
with the felt continuity of both; what Fichte
would call the Ego, the Non-Ego, and Life.
Where no particular events are recognised there
is still a feeling of continuous existence. We
trail after us from our whole past some sense of
the continuous energy and movement both of our
passionate fancies and of the phantasmagoria
capriciously at work beyond. An ignorant mind
believes itself omniscient and omnipotent; those
impulses in itself which really represent the iner
tia and unspent momentum of its last dream it
regards as the creative forces of nature.

The first lines of cleavage and the first recognis
able bulks at which attention is arrested are in truth
those shadowy Fichtean divisions: such are the
rude beginnings of logical architecture. In its
inability to descry anything definite and fixed, for
want of an acquired empirical background and a
distinct memory, the mind flounders forward in a
dream full of prophecies and wayward identifica
tions. The world possesses as yet in its regard
only the superficial forms that appear in revery,
it has no hidden machinery, no third dimension
in which unobserved and perpetual operations are
going on. Its only terms, in a word, are concre
tions in discourse, ideas combined in their aesthetic I
and logical harmonies, not in their habitual and
efficacious conjunctions. The disorder of such
experience is still a spontaneous disorder; it has
not discovered how calculable are its unpremedi-

188 THE LIFE OF REASON

tated shocks. The cataclysms that occur seem to
have only ideal grounds and only dramatic mean
ing. Though the dream may have its terrors and
degenerate at moments into a nightmare, it has
still infinite plasticity and buoyancy. What per
ceptions are retained merge in those haunting and
friendly presences, they have an intelligible and
congenial character because they appear as parts
and effluences of an inner fiction, evolving accord
ing to the barbaric prosody of an almost infant
mind.

This is the fairy-land of idealism where only
the miraculous seems a matter of course and every
hint of what is purely natural is disregarded,
for the truly natural still seems artificial, dead,
and remote. New and disconcerting facts, which
intrude themselves inopportunely into the story,
chill the currents of spontaneous imagination and
are rejected as long as possible for being alien and
perverse. Perceptions, on the contrary, which can
be attached to the old presences as confirmations
or corollaries, become at once parts of the warp
and woof of what we call ourselves. They seem
of the very substance of spirit, obeying a vital
momentum and flowing from the inmost principle
of being; and they are so much akin to human
presumptions that they pass for manifestations of
necessary truth. Thus the demonstrations of geom
etry being but the intent explication of a long-
consolidated ideal concretion which we call space,
are welcomed by the mind as in a sense familiar

VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS 189

and as revelations of a truth implicit in the soul,
so that Plato could plausibly take them for rec
ollections of prenatal wisdom. But a rocket that
bursts into sparks of a dozen colours, even if ex
pected, is expected with anxiety and observed with
surprise; it assaults the senses at an incalculable
moment with a sensation individual and new.
The exciting tension and lively stimulus may
please in their way, yet the badge of the acciden
tal and unmeaning adheres to the thing. It is a
trivial experience and one quickly forgotten. The
shock is superficial and were it repeated would
soon fatigue. We should retire with relief into
darkness and silence, to our permanent and
rational thoughts.

Naturalism ^ is a remarkable fact, which may
sad - easily be misinterpreted, that while all

the benefits and pleasures of life seem to be asso
ciated with external things, and all certain knowl
edge seems to describe material laws, yet a deified
nature has generally inspired a religion of melan
choly. / Why should the only intelligible philoso
phy seem to defeat reason and the chief means of
benefiting mankind seem to blast our best hopes?
Whence this profound aversion to so beautiful and
fruitful a universe ? Whence this persistent search
for invisible regions and powers and for meta
physical explanations that can explain nothing,
while nature s voice without and within man cries
aloud to him to look, act, and enjoy? And when
someone, in protest against such senseless oracu-

190 THE LIFE OF REASON

lar prejudices, has actually embraced the life and
faith of nature and taught others to look to the
natural world for all motives and sanctions, ex
pecting thus to refresh and marvellously to invig
orate human life, why have those innocent hopes
failed so miserably? Why is that sensuous opti
mism we may call Greek, or that industrial opti
mism we may call American, such a thin disguise
for despair? Why does each melt away and
become a mockery at the first approach of reflec
tion?) Why has man s conscience in the end in
variably rebelled against naturalism and reverted
in some form or other to a cultus of the unseen?

answer i n the WOrds of

The soul akin

to the eternal Saint Paul i because things seen are
temporal and things not seen are eter
nal. And we may add, remembering our analysis
of the objects inhabiting the mind, that the eter
nal is the truly human, that which is akin to the
first indispensable products of intelligence, which
arise by the fusion of successive images in dis
course, and transcend the particular in time, peo
pling the mind with permanent and recognisable
objects, and strengthening it with a synthetic,
dramatic apprehension of itself and its own experi
ence. Concretion in existence, on the contrary,
yields essentially detached and empirical unities,
foreign to mind in spite of their order, and unin
telligible in spite of their clearness. Eeason fails
to assimilate in them precisely that which makes
them real, namely, their presence here and now,

VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS 191

in this order and number. The form and qual
ity of them we can retain, domesticate, and weave
into the texture of reflection, but their existence
and individuality remain a datum of sense need
ing to be verified anew at every moment and
actually receiving continual verification or dis
proof while we live in this world.

" This world " we call it, not without justifiable
pathos, for many other worlds are conceivable
and if discovered might prove more rational and
intelligible and more akin to the soul than this
strange universe which man has hitherto always
looked upon with increasing astonishment] The
materials of experience are no sooner in nand
than they are transformed by intelligence, re
duced to those permanent presences, those na
tures and relations, which alone can live in
discourse. Those materials, rearranged into the
abstract summaries we call history or science,
or pieced out into the reconstructions and ex
tensions we call poetry or religion, furnish us
with ideas of as many dream-worlds as we
please, all nearer to reason s ideal than is the
actual chaos of perceptual experience, and some
nearer to the heart s desire. /When an em
pirical philosophy, therefore, calls us back from
the irresponsible flights of imagination to the
shock of sense and tries to remind us that in this
alone we touch existence and come upon fact, we
feel dispossessed of our nature and cramped in
our life. The actuality possessed by external ex-

192 THE LIFE OF REASON

perience cannot make up for its instability, nor

- /the applicability of scientific principles for their
1 y hypothetical character. The dependence upon

sense, which we are reduced to when we consider
the world of existences, becomes a too plain hint
of our essential impotence and mortality, while
the play of logical fancy, though it remain in
evitable, is saddened by a consciousness of its own
insignificance.

That dignity, then, which inheres in logical ideas
and their affinity to moral enthusiasm, springs
from their congruity with the primary habits of
intelligence and idealisation. The soul or self or
personality, which in sophisticated social life is
so much the centre of passion and concern, is itself
an idea, a concretion in discourse; and the level
on which it swims comes to be, by association and
affinity, the region of all the more vivid and mas
sive human interests. The pleasures which lie
Her beneath it are ignored, and the ideals

inexperience, which lie above it are not perceived.
Aversion to an empirical or naturalistic philoso
phy accordingly expresses a sort of logical patriot
ism and attachment to homespun ideas. The
actual is too remote and unfriendly to the
dreamer ; to understand it he has to learn a foreign
tongue, which his native prejudice imagines to be

unmeaning and unpoetical. The truth is, how-
! ever, that nature s language is too rich for man;

and the discomfort he feels when he is compelled
to use it merely marks his lack of education.

VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS 193

There is nothing cheaper than idealism. It can
be had by merely not observing the ineptitude of
our chance prejudices, and by declaring that the
first rhymes that have struck our ear are the
eternal and necessary harmonies of the world,
piatonism The thinker s bias is naturally favour-

spontaneous. a ble to logical ideas. The man of re
flection will attribute, as far as possible, validity
and reality to these alone. Piatonism remains the
classic instance of this way of thinking. Living
in an age of rhetoric, with an education that dealt
with nothing but ideal entities, verbal, moral, or
mathematical, Plato saw in concretions in dis
course the true elements of being. Definable
meanings, being the terms of thought, must also,
he fancied, be the constituents of reality. And
with that directness and audacity which was pos
sible to the ancients, and of which Pythagoreans
and Eleatics had already given brilliant examples,
he set up these terms of discourse, like the Pythag
orean numbers, for absolute and eternal entities,
existing before all things, revealed in all things,
giving the cosmic artificer his models and the
creature his goal. By some inexplicable necessity
the creation had taken place. The ideas had mul
tiplied themselves in a flux of innumerable images
which could be recognised by their resemblance to
their originals, but were at once cancelled and ex
punged by virtue of their essential inadequacy.
What sounds are to words and words to thoughts,
that was a thing to its idea.
VOL. I 13

194 THE LIFE OF REASON

Plato, however, retained the moral and signifi
cant essence of his ideas, and while he made them
its essential ^ ea ^ absolutes, fixed meanings antece-
fideiity to the dent to their changing expressions,
never dreamed that they could be nat
ural existences, or psychological beings. In an
original thinker, in one who really thinks and
does not merely argue, to call a thing super
natural, or spiritual, or intelligible is to declare
that it is no thing at all, no existence actual
or possible, but a value, a term of thought, a
merely ideal principle ; and the more its reality in
such a sense is insisted on the more its incommen
surability with brute existence is asserted. To ex
press this ideal reality myth is the natural vehicle ;
a vehicle Plato could avail himself of all the more
freely that he inherited a religion still plastic and
conscious of its poetic essence, and did not have to
struggle, like his modern disciples, with the ar
rested childishness of minds that for a hundred
generations have learned their metaphysics in the
cradle. His ideas, although their natural basis
was ignored, were accordingly always ideal; they
always represented meanings and functions and
were never degraded from the moral to the physi
cal sphere. The counterpart of this genuine ideal
ity was that the theory retained its moral force and
did not degenerate into a bewildered and idola
trous pantheism. Plato conceived the soul s des
tiny to be her emancipation from those material
things which in this illogical apparition were so

VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS 195

alien to her essence. She should return, after her
baffling and stupefying intercourse with the world
of sense and accident, into the native heaven of her
ideas. For animal desires were no less illusory,
and yet no less significant, than sensuous percep
tions. They engaged man in the pursuit of the
good and taught him, through disappointment, to
look for it only in those satisfactions which can
be permanent and perfect. Love, like intelli
gence, must rise from appearance to reality, and
rest in that divine world which is the fulfilment
of the human.

A geometrician does a good service when he de
clares and explicates the nature of the triangle,
an object suggested by many casual and recurring
sensations. His service is not less real, even if less
obvious, when he arrests some fundamental con
cretion in discourse, and formulates the first prin
ciples of logic. Mastering such definitions, sinking
into the dry life of such forms, he may spin out
and develop indefinitely, in the freedom of his irre
sponsible logic, their implications and congruous
extensions, opening by his demonstration a depth
of knowledge which we should otherwise never
have discovered in ourselves. But if the geometer
Equal rights na( l a fanatical zeal and forbade us to
of empiricism, consider space and the triangles it con
tains otherwise than as his own ideal science con
siders them: forbade us, for instance, to inquire
how we came to perceive those triangles or that
space; what organs and senses conspired in fur-

196 THE LIFE OF KEASON

nishing the idea of them; what material objects
show that character, and how they came to offer
themselves to our observation then surely the
geometer would qualify his service with a distinct
injury and while he opened our eyes to one fas
cinating vista would tend to blind them to others
no less tempting and beautiful. For the natural
ist and psychologist have also their rights and can
tell us things well worth knowing; nor will any
theory they may possibly propose concerning the
origin of spatial ideas and their material embodi
ments ever invalidate the demonstrations of geom
etry. These, in their hypothetical sphere, are per
fectly autonomous and self-generating, and their
applicability to experience will hold so long as the
initial images they are applied to continue to
abound in perception.

If we awoke to-morrow in a world containing
nothing but music, geometry would indeed lose
its relevance to our future experience ; but it would
keep its ideal cogency, and become again a living
language if any spatial objects should ever re
appear in sense.

The history of such reappearances natural his
tory is meantime a good subject for observation
and experiment. Chronicler and critic can always
approach experience with a method complementary
to the deductive methods pursued in mathematics
and logic: instead of developing the import of a
definition, he can investigate its origin and de
scribe its ^relation to other disparate phenomena.

VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS 197

The mathematician develops the import of given
ideas; the psychologist investigates their origin
and describes their relation to the rest of human
experience. So Ithe prophet develops the import
of his trance, Irad the theologian the import of the
prophecy : which prevents not the historian from
coming later and showing the origin, the growth,
and the possible function of that maniacal sort
of wisdom. True, the theologian commonly
dreads a critic more than does the geometer, but
this happens only because the theologian has prob
ably not developed the import of his facts with
any austerity or clearness, but has distorted that
ideal interpretation with all sorts of concessions
and side-glances at other tenets to which he is
already pledged, so that he justly fears, when his
methods are exposed, that the religious heart will
be alienated from him and his conclusions be left
with no foothold in human nature. If he had not
been guilty of such misrepresentation, no history
or criticism that reviewed his construction would
do anything but recommend it to all those who
found in themselves the primary religious facts
and religious faculties which that construction
had faithfully interpreted in its ideal deductions
and extensions. All who perceived the facts
would thus learn their import ; and theology would
reveal to the soul her natural religion, just as
Euclid reveals to architects and navigators the
structure of natural space, so that they value his
demonstrations not only for their hypothetical

198 THE LIFE OF KEASON

cogency but for their practical relevance and
truth.

Now, like the geometer and ingenuous theo
logian that he was, Plato developed the import of
moral and logical experience. Even his followers,
though they might give rein to narrower and more
fantastic enthusiasms, often unveiled secrets, hid
den in the oracular intent of the heart, which
might never have been disclosed but for their les
sons. But with a zeal unbecoming so well
grounded a philosophy they turned their backs
upon the rest of wisdom, they disparaged the evi
dence of sense, they grew hot against the ultimate
practical sanctions furnished by impulse and
pleasure, they proscribed beauty in art (where
Plato had proscribed chiefly what to a fine sensi
bility is meretricious ugliness), and in a word they
sought to abolish all human activities other than
the one pre-eminent in themselves. In revenge
for their hostility the great world has

Logic depend- J

ent on fact for never given them more than a distrust-
its importance, ful a d m i ra tion and, confronted daily
by the evident truths they denied, has encouraged
itself to forget the truths they asserted. For they
had the bias of reflection and man is born to do
more than reflect; they attributed reality and
validity only to logical ideas, and man finds other
objects continually thrusting themselves before his
eyes, claiming his affection and controlling his
fortunes.

The most legitimate constructions of reason

VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS 199

soon become merely speculative, soon pass, I
mean, beyond the sphere of practical applica
tion; and the man of affairs, adjusting himself
at every turn to the opaque brutality of fact, loses
his respect for the higher reaches of logic and for
gets that his recognition of facts themselves is an
application of logical principles. In his youth,
perhaps, he pursued metaphysics, which are the
love-affairs of the understanding; now he is wed
ded to convention and seeks in the passion he calls
business or in the habit he calls duty some substi
tute for natural happiness. He fears to question
the value of his life, having found that such ques
tioning adds nothing to his powers ; and he thinks
the mariner would die of old age in port who
should wait for reason to justify his voyage.
Eeason is indeed like the sad Iphigenia whom her
royal father, the Will, must sacrifice before any
wind can fill his sails. The emanation of all
things from the One involves not only the incar
nation but the crucifixion of the Logos. Reason
must be eclipsed by its supposed expressions, and
can only shine in a darkness which does not com
prehend it. For reason is essentially hypotheti- .
cal and subsidiary, and can never constitute what
it expresses in man, nor what it recognises in
nature.

and for its If logic should refuse to make this

subsistence, initial self -sacrifice and to subordinate
itself to impulse and fact, it would immediately
become irrational and forfeit its own justification.

200 THE LIFE OF KEASON

For it exists by virtue of a human impulse and in
answer to a human need. To ask a man, in the
satisfaction of a metaphysical passion, to forego
every other good is to render him fanatical and to
shut his eyes daily to the sun in order that he may
see better by the star-light. The radical fault of
rationalism is not any incidental error committed
in its deductions, although such necessarily abound
in every human system. Its great original sin is
its denial of its own basis and its refusal to occupy
its due place in the world, an ignorant fear of
being invalidated by its history and dishonoured,
as it were, if its ancestry is hinted at. Only
bastards should fear that fate, and criticism would
indeed be fatal to a bastard philosophy, to one that
does not spring from practical reason and has no
roots in life. But those products of reason which
arise by reflection on fact, and those spontaneous
and demonstrable systems of ideas which can be
verified in experience, and thus serve to render the
facts calculable and articulate, will lose nothing of
their lustre by discovering their lineage. So the
idea of nature remains true after psychology has
analysed its origin, and not only true, but beau
tiful and beneficent. For unlike many negligible
products of speculative fancy it is woven out of
recurrent perceptions into a hypothetical cause
from which further perceptions can be deduced as
they are actually experienced.

Such a mechanism once discovered confirms
itself at every breath we draw, and surrounds

VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS 201

every object in history and nature with infinite
and true suggestions,, making it doubly inter
esting, fruitful, and potent over the mind. The
naturalist accordingly welcomes criticism because
his constructions, though no less hypothetical
and speculative than the idealist s dreams, are
such legitimate and fruitful fictions that they

, are obvious truths. For truth, at the intelligi
ble level where it arises, means not sensible
fact, but valid ideation, verified hypothesis, and

- inevitable, stable inference. If the idealist fears
and deprecates any theory of his own origin
.and function, he is only obeying the instinct of
self-preservation; for he knows very well that his
past will not bear examination. He is heir to every
superstition and by profession an apologist; his
deepest vocation is to rescue, by some logical tour
de force, what spontaneously he himself would have
taken for a consecrated error. Now history and
criticism would involve, as he instinctively per
ceives, the reduction of his doctrines to their prag
matic value, to their ideal significance for real life.
But he detests any admission of relativity in his
doctrines, all the more because he cannot avow his
reasons for detesting it; and zeal, here as in so
many cases, becomes the cover and evidence of a
bad conscience. Bigotry and craft, with a rhetori
cal vilification of enemies, then come to reinforce
in the prophet that natural limitation of his in
terests which turns his face away from history and
Criticism; until his system, in its monstrous un-

202 THE LIFE OF REASON

reality and disingenuousness, becomes intolerable,
and provokes a general revolt in which too often
the truth of it is buried with the error in a com
mon oblivion, j

Reason and ^ idealism is intrenched in the very
docility. structure of human reason, empiricism
represents all those energies of the external uni
verse which, as Spinoza says, must infinitely ex
ceed the energies of man. If meditation breeds
science, wisdom comes by disillusion, even on the
subject of science itself. Docility to the facts
makes the sanity of science. Reason is only half
grown and not really distinguishable from imag
ination so long as she cannot check and recast her
own processes wherever they render the moulds
of thought unfit for their subject-matter. Docil
ity is, as we have seen, the deepest condition of
reason s existence ; for if a form of mental synthe
sis were by chance developed which was incapable
of appropriating the data of sense^these data could
not be remembered or introduced at all into a
growing and cumulative experience. Sensations
would leave no memorial; while logical thoughts
would play idly, like so many parasites in the
mind, and ultimately languish and die of inani
tion. To be nourished and employed, intelligence
must have developed such structure and habits as
will enable it to assimilate what food comes in its
way; so that the persistence of any intellectual
habit is a proof that it has some applicability,
however partial, to the facts of sentience.

VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS 203

Applicable This applicability, the prerequisite

cLrified and of sig 111 ^ 1 ^ thought, is also its
experience. eventual test ; and the gathering of
new experiences, the consciousness of more and
more facts crowding into the memory and demand
ing co-ordination, is at once the presentation to
reason of her legitimate problem and a proof that
she is already at work. It is a presentation of her
problem, because reason is not a faculty of dreams
but a method in living; and by facing the flux of
sensations and impulses~~that constitute mortal life
with the gift of ideal construction and the aspira
tion toward eternal goods, she is only doing her
duty and manifesting what she is. To accumu
late facts, moreover, is in itself to prove that
rational activity is already awakened, because a
consciousness of multitudinous accidents diversi
fying experience involves a wide scope in memory,
good methods of classification, and keen senses, so
that all working together they may collect many
observations. Memory and all its instruments are
embodiments, on a modest scale, of rational activi
ties which in tfceory and speculation reappear upon
a higher level. The expansion of the mind in
point of retentiveness and wealth of images is as
much an advance in knowledge as is its develop
ment in point of organisation. The structure may
be widened at the base as well as raised toward
its ideal summit, and while a mass of information
imperfectly digested leaves something still for in
telligence to do, it shows at the same time how
much intelligence has done already.

204 THE LIFE OF EEASON

The function of reason is to dominate experi
ence; and obviously openness to new impressions
is no less necessary to that end than is the pos
session of principles by which new impressions
may be interpreted.

CHAPTER IX

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL

Functional Nothing is more natural or more

minded * congruous with all the analogies of ex-
body, perience than that animals should feel
and think. The relation of mind to body, of rea
son to nature, seems to be actually this: when
bodies have reached a certain complexity and vital
equilibrium, a sense begins to inhabit them which
is focussed upon the preservation of that body and
on its reproduction. This sense, as it becomes
reflective and expressive of physical welfare, points
more and more to its own persistence and har
mony, and generates the Life of Reason. Nature
is reason s basis and theme; reason is nature s
consciousness ; and, from the point of view of that
consciousness when it has arisen, reason is also
nature s justification and goal.

To separate things so closely bound together as
are mind and body, reason and nature, is conse
quently a violent and artificial divorce, and a
man of judgment will instinctively discredit any
philosophy in which it is decreed. But to avoid
divorce it is well first to avoid unnatural unions,
and not to attribute to our two elements, which

205

206 THE LIFE OF EEASON

must be partners for life, relations repugnant to
their respective natures and offices. Now the body
is an instrument, the mind its function, the wit
ness and reward of its operation. Mind is the
body s entelechy, a value which accrues to the
body when it has reached a certain perfection, of
which it would be a pity, so to speak, that it
should remain unconscious ; so that while the body
feeds the mind the mind perfects the body, lifting
it and all its natural relations and impulses into
the moral world, into the sphere of interests and
ideas.

No connection could be closer than this re
ciprocal involution, as nature and life reveal it;
but the connection is natural, not dialectical.
The union will be denaturalised and, so far as
philosophy goes, actually destroyed, if we seek to
carry it on into logical equivalence. If we isolate
the terms mind and body and study the inward
implications of each apart, we shall never discover
the other. That matter cannot, by transposition
of its particles, become what we call consciousness,
is an admitted truth; that mind cannot become its
own occasions or determine its own march, though
it be a truth not recognised by all philosophers, is
in itself no less obvious. Matter, dialectically
studied, makes consciousness seem a superfluous
and unaccountable addendum; mind, studied in
the same way, makes nature an embarrassing idea,
a figment which ought to be subservient to con
scious aims and perfectly transparent, but which

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 207

remains opaque and overwhelming. In order to
escape these sophistications, it suffices to revert to
immediate observation and state the question in
its proper terms : nature lives, and perception is a
private echo and response to ambient motions.
The soul is the voice of the body s interests; in
watching them a man defines the world that sus
tains him and that conditions all his satisfactions.
In discerning his origin he christens Nature by the
eloquent name of mother, under which title she
enters the universe of discourse. Simultaneously
he discerns his own existence and marks off the
inner region of his dreams. And it behooves him
not to obliterate these discoveries. By trying to
give his mind false points of attachment in nature
he would disfigure not only nature but also that
reason which is so much the essence of his life.
They form one Consciousness, then, is the expression
natural life. O f bodily life and the seat of all its
values. Its place in the natural world is like that
of its own ideal products, art, religion, or science ;
it translates natural relations into synthetic and
ideal symbols by which things are interpreted with
reference to the interests of consciousness itself.
This representation is also an existence and has its
place along with all other existences in the bosom
of nature. In this sense its connection with its
organs, and with all that affects the body or that
the body affects, is a natural connection. If the
word cause did not suggest dialectical bonds we
might innocently say that thought was a link in

208 THE LIFE OF REASON

the chain of natural causes. It is at least a link in
the chain of natural events ; for it has determinate
antecedents in the brain and senses and determi
nate consequents in actions and words. But this
dependence and this efficacy have nothing logical
about them; they are habitual collocations in the
world, like lightning and thunder. A more mi
nute inspection of psycho-physical processes, were
it practicable, would doubtless disclose undreamed
of complexities and harmonies in them ; the mathe
matical and dynamic relations of stimulus and
sensation might perhaps be formulated with pre
cision. But the terms used in the equation, their
quality and inward habit, would always remain
data which the naturalist would have to assume
after having learned them by inspection. Move
ment could never be deduced dialectically or
graphically from thought nor thought from move
ment. Indeed no natural relation is in a different
case. Neither gravity, nor chemical reaction, nor
life and reproduction, nor time, space, and motion
themselves are logically deducible, nor intelligible
in terms of their limits. The phenomena have to
be accepted at their face value and allowed to
retain a certain empirical complexity; otherwise
the seed of all science is sterilised and calculation
cannot proceed for want of discernible and preg
nant elements.

How fine nature s habits may be, where repeti
tion begins, and down to what depth a mathe
matical treatment can penetrate, is a question for

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 209

the natural sciences to solve. Whether conscious
ness, for instance, accompanies vegetative life, or
even all motion, is a point to be decided solely by
empirical analogy. When the exact physical con
ditions of thought are discovered in man, we may
infer how far thought is diffused through the uni
verse, for it will be coextensive with the condi
tions it will have been shown to have. Now, in
a very rough way, we know already what these con
ditions are. They are first the existence of an
organic body and then its possession of adaptable
instincts, of instincts that can be modified by ex
perience. This capacity is what an observer calls
intelligence; docility is the observable half of rea
son. When an animal winces at a blow and read
justs his pose, we say he feels; and we say he
thinks when we see him brooding over his impres
sions, and find him launching into a new course
of action after a silent decoction of his potential
impulses. Conversely, when observation covers
both the mental and the physical process, that is,
in our own experience, we find that felt impulses,
the conceived objects for which they make, and the
values they determine are all correlated with ani
mal instincts and external impressions. A desire
is the inward sign of a physical proclivity to act,
an image in sense is the sign in most cases of some
material object in the environment and always,
we may presume, of some cerebral change. The
brain seems to simmer like a caldron in which
all sorts of matters are perpetually transforming
VOL. L-14

210 THE LIFE OF REASON

themselves into all sorts of shapes. When this
cerebral reorganisation is pertinent to the external
situation and renders the man, when he resumes
action, more a master of his world, the accompany
ing thought is said to be practical ; for it brings a
consciousness of power and an earnest of success.
Cerebral processes are of course largely hypo
thetical. Theory suggests their existence, and ex
perience can verify that theory only in an indirect*
and imperfect manner. The addition of a physi
cal substratum to all thinking is only a scientific
expedient, a hypothesis expressing the faith that
nature is mechanically intelligible even beyond
the reaches of minute verification. The accom
panying consciousness, on the other hand, is some
thing intimately felt by each man in his own per
son; it is a portion of crude and immediate
experience. That it accompanies changes in his
body and in the world is not an inference for him
but a datum. But when crude experience is
somewhat refined and the soul, at first mingled
with every image, finds that it inhabits only her
private body, to whose fortunes hers are altogether
wedded, we begin to imagine that we know the
cosmos at large better than the spirit; for beyond
the narrow limits of our own person only the mate
rial phase of things is open to our observation.
To add a mental phase to every part and motion
of the cosmos is then seen to be an audacious
fancy. It violates all empirical analogy, for the
phenomenon which feeling accompanies in crude

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 211

experience is not mere material existence, but
reactive organisation and docility.
Artifices The limits set to observation,, how-

invoivedin e render the mental and material

separating

them. spheres far from coincident, and even

in a rough way mutually supplementary, so that
human reflection has fallen into a habit of inter
larding them. The world, instead of being a living
body, a natural system with moral functions, has
seemed to be a bisectible hybrid, half material and
half mental, the clumsy conjunction of an autom- -f
aton with a ghost. These phases, taken in their
abstraction, as they first forced themselves on
human attention, have been taken for independent
and separable facts. Experience, remaining in
both provinces quite sensuous and superficial, has
accordingly been allowed to link this purely men
tal event with that purely mechanical one. The
linkage is practically not deceptive, because men
tal transformations are indeed signs of changes
in bodies ; and so long as a cause is defined merely
as a sign, mental and physical changes may truly
be said to cause one another. But so soon as this
form of augury tries to overcome its crude empiri
cism and to establish phenomenal laws, the men
tal factor has to fall out of the efficient process
and be represented there by what, upon accurate
examination, it is seen to be really the sign of I
mean by some physiological event.

If philosophers of the Cartesian school had taken
to heart, as the German transcendentalists did, the

212 THE LIFE OF KEASON

cogito ergo sum of their master, and had considered
that a physical world is, for knowledge, nothing
, but an instrument to explain sensations and their
1 order, they might have expected this collapse of
half their metaphysics at the approach of their
positive science: for if mental existence was to
be kept standing only by its supposed causal
efficacy nothing could prevent the whole world
from becoming presently a lete-machine. Psychic
events have no links save through their organs
and their objects; the function of the material
world is, indeed, precisely to supply their linkage.
The internal relations of ideas, on the other hand,
are dialectical; their realm is eternal and abso
lutely irrelevant to the march of events. If we
must speak, therefore, of causal relations between
mind and body, we should say that matter is the
pervasive cause of mind s distribution, and mind
the pervasive cause of matter s discovery and
value. To ask for an efficient cause, to trace back
a force or investigate origins, is to have already
turned one s face in the direction of matter and
mechanical laws : no success in that undertaking
can fail to be a triumph for materialism. To ask
for a justification, on the other hand, is to turn no
less resolutely in the direction of ideal results and
actualities from which instrumentality and further
use have been eliminated. Spirit is useless, being
the end of things : but it is not vain, since it alone
rescues all else from vanity. It is called prac
tical when it is prophetic of its own better fulfil-

HOW THOUGHT IS PKACTICAL 213

ments, which is the case whenever forces are being
turned to good uses, whenever an organism is ex
ploring its relations and putting forth new ten
tacles with which to grasp the world,
consciousness We saw in the beginning that the
Tumbrium^ 1 ex ig ences f bodily life gave conscious-
and docility, ness its first articulation. A bodily
feat, like nutrition or reproduction, is celebrated
by a festival in the mind, and consciousness is a
sort of ritual solemnising by prayer, jubilation, or
mourning, the chief episodes in the body s fort
unes. The organs, by their structure, select the
impressions possible to them from the divers in
fluences abroad in the world, all of which, if ani
mal organisms had learned to feed upon them,
might plausibly have offered a basis for sensation.
Every instinct or habitual impulse further selects
from the passing bodily affections those that are
pertinent to its own operation and which conse
quently adhere to it and modify its reactive
machinery. Prevalent and notable sensations are
therefore signs, presumably marking the presence
of objects important for the body s welfare or for
the execution of its predestined offices. So that
not only are the soul s aims transcripts of the
body s tendencies, but all ideas are grafted upon
the interplay of these tendencies with environing
forces. Early images hover about primary wants
as highest conceptions do about ultimate achieve
ments.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense

214 THE LIFE OF KEASON

that but for thought no motion would be an action,
no change a progress; but thought is in no way

instrumental or servile; it is an ex
its worthless- . , . -.

ness as a cause penence realised, not a force to be
and value as used. That same spontaneity in na-

an expression. . -, . , , . 1 n

ture which has suggested a good must
be trusted to fulfil it. If we look fairly at the
actual resources of our minds we perceive that
we are as little informed concerning the means
and processes of action as concerning the rea
son why our motives move us. To execute the
simplest intention we must rely on fate: our
own acts are mysteries to us. Do I know how
I open my eyes or how I walk down stairs? Is
it the supervising wisdom of consciousness that
guides me in these acts? Is it the mind that
controls the bewildered body and points out
the way to physical habits uncertain of their
affinities? Or is it not much rather automatic
inward machinery that executes the marvellous
work, while the mind catches here and there
some glimpse of the operation, now with de
light and adhesion, now with impotent rebel
lion ? When impulses work themselves out unim
peded we say we act; when they are thwarted we
say we are acted upon; but in neither case do we
in the least understand the natural history of
what is occurring. The mind at best vaguely
forecasts the result of action: a schematic verbal
sense of the end to be accomplished possibly hovers
in consciousness while the act is being performed ;

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 215

but this premonition is itself the sense of a proc
ess already present and betrays the tendency at
work; it can obviously give no aid or direction to
the unknown mechanical process that produced it
and that must realise its own prophecy, if that
prophecy is to be realised at all.

That such an unknown mechanism exists, and
is adequate to explain every so-called decision, is
indeed a hypothesis far outrunning detailed veri
fication, although conceived by legitimate analogy
with whatever is known about natural processes;
but that the mind is not the source of itself or its
own transformations is a matter of present experi
ence; for the world is an unaccountable datum,
in its existence, in its laws, and in its incidents.
The highest hopes of science and morality look
only to discovering those laws and bringing one
set of incidents facts of perception into har
mony with another set facts of preference. This
hoped-for issue, if it comes, must come about in
the mind; but the mind cannot be its cause since,
by hypothesis, it does not possess the ideas it seeks
nor has power to realise the harmonies it desider
ates. These have to be waited for and begged of
destiny ; human will, not controlling its basis, can
not possibly control its effects. Its existence and
its efforts have at best the value of a good omen.
They show in what direction natural forces are
moving in so far as they are embodied in given
men.

Men, like all things else in the world, are prod-

216 THE LIFE OF EEASON

nets and vehicles of natural energy, and their

operation counts. But their conscious will, in its

moral assertiveness, is merely a sign

Thought s J

march auto- of that energy and of that will s event-
matic and ua j fortunes. Dramatic terror and

thereby im-

plicated in dramatic humour both depend on con-
events, trasting the natural pregnancy of a
passion with its conscious intent. Everything in
human life is ominous, even the voluntary acts.
We cannot, by taking thought, add a cubit to our
stature, but we may build up a world without
meaning it. Man is as full of potentiality as he is
of impotence. A will that represents many active
forces, and is skilful in divination and augury,
may long boast to be almighty without being con
tradicted by the event.

That thought is not self-directive appears best
in the most immaterial processes. In strife
against external forces men, being ignorant of
their deeper selves, attribute the obvious effects of
their action to their chance ideas; but when the
process is wholly internal the real factors are more
evenly represented in consciousness and the magi
cal, involuntary nature of life is better perceived.
My hand, guided by I know not what machinery,
is at this moment adding syllable to syllable upon
this paper, to the general fulfilment, perhaps, of
my felt intent, yet giving that intent an articula
tion wholly unforeseen, and often disappointing.
The thoughts to be expressed simmer half-con-
sciously in my brain. I feel their burden and

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 217

tendency without seeing their form,, until the
mechanical train of impulsive association, started
by the perusal of what precedes or by the acciden
tal emergence of some new idea, lights the fuse
and precipitates the phrases. If this happens in
the most reflective and deliberate of activities, like
this of composition, how much more does it hap
pen in positive action, " The die is

Contemplative r

essence of cast," said CaBsar, feeling a decision
in himself of which he could neither
count nor weigh the multitudinous causes; and so
says every strong and clear intellect, every well-
formed character, seizing at the same moment
with comprehensive instinct both its purposes and
the means by which they shall be attained. Only
the fool, whose will signifies nothing, boasts to
have created it himself.

We must not seek the function of thought, then,
in any supposed power to discover either ends not
suggested by natural impulse or means to the ac
complishment of those irrational ends. Atten
tion is utterly powerless to change or create its
objects in either respect; it rather registers with
out surprise for it expects nothing in particular
and watches eagerly the images bubbling up in
the living mind and the processes evolving there.
These processes are themselves full of potency and
promise; will and reflection are no more incon
sequential than any other processes bound by
natural links to the rest of the world. Even if an
atomic mechanism suffices to mark the concatena-

218 THE LIFE OF KEASON

tion of everything in nature, including the mind,
it cannot rob what it abstracts from of its natural
weight and reality: a thread that may suffice to
hold the pearls together is not the whole cause of
the necklace. But this pregnancy and implica
tion of thought in relation to its natural environ
ment is purely empirical. Since natural connec
tion is merely a principle of arrangement by which
the contiguities of things may be described and
inferred, there is no difficulty in admitting con
sciousness and all its works into the web and woof
of nature. Each psychic episode would be her
alded by its material antecedents; its transforma
tions would be subject to mechanical laws, which
would also preside over the further transition from
thought into its material expression.
Mechanical This inclusion of mind in nature,
efficacy alien j loweve r, is as far as possible from

to thought s

essence. constituting the mind s function and
value, or its efficacy in a moral and rational
sense. To have prepared changes in matter
would give no rationality to mind unless those
changes in turn paved the way to some better men
tal existence. The worth of natural efficacy is
therefore always derivative; the utility of mind
would be no more precious than the utility of mat
ter; both borrow all their worth from the part
they may play empirically in introducing those
\ moral values which are intrinsic and self-sufficing.
In so far as thought is instrumental it is not worth
having, any more than matter, except for its prom-

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 219

ise; it must terminate in something truly profit
able and ultimate which, being good in itself, may
lend value to all that led up to it. But this ulti
mate good is itself consciousness, thought, rational
activity; so that what instrumental mentality may
have preceded might be abolished without loss, if
matter suffices to sustain reason in being; or if
that instrumental mentality is worth retaining, it
is so only because it already contains some pre
monition and image of its own fulfilment. In
a word, the value of thought is ideal. The mate
rial efficacy which may be attributed to it is the
proper efficacy of matter an efficacy which mat
ter would doubtless claim if we knew enough of
its secret mechanism. And when that imputed
and incongruous utility was subtracted from ideas
they would appear in their proper form of expres
sions, realisations, ultimate fruits.

The incongruity of making thought, in its
moral and logical essence, an instrument in the
natural world will appear from a different point
of view if we shift the discussion for a moment to
a transcendental level. Since the material world
is an object for thought, and potential in relation
Consciousness to immediate experience, it can hardly
transcendental. li e j n the same plane of reality with
the thought to which it appears. Tlie spectator on
this side of the foot-lights, while surely regarded
by the play as a whole, cannot expect to figure in
its mechanism or to see himself strutting among
the actors on the boards. He listens and is served,

220 THE LIFE OF REASON

being at once impotent and supreme. It has been
well said that

Only the free divine the laws,
The causeless only know the cause.

Conversely, what in such a transcendental sense
is causeless and free will evidently not be causal
or determinant, being something altogether uni
versal and notional, without inherent determina
tions or specific affinities. The objects figuring in
consciousness will have implications and will re
quire causes ; not so the consciousness itself. The
Ego to which all things appear equally, whatever
their form or history, is the ground of nothing
incidental: no specific characters or order found
in the world can be attributed to its efficacy. The
march of experience is not determined by the mere
fact that experience exists. Another experience,
differently logical, might be equally real. Con
sciousness is not itself dynamic, for it has no body,
no idiosyncrasy or particular locus, to be the point
of origin for definite relationships. It is merely
an abstract name for the actuality of its random
objects. All force, implication, or direction
inhere in the constitution of specific objects and
live in their interplay. Logic is revealed to
thought no less than nature is, and even what we
call invention or fancy is generated not by thought
itself but by the chance fertility of nebulous
objects, floating and breeding in the primeval
chaos. Where the natural order lapses, if it ever

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 221

does, not mind or will or reason can possibly inter
vene to fill the chasm for these are parcels and
expressions of the natural order but only noth
ingness and pure chance.

Thought is thus an expression of natural rela
tions, as will is of natural affinities ; yet conscious
ness of an object s value, while it declares the
blind disposition to pursue that object, consti
tutes its entire worth. Apart from the pains and
satisfactions involved, an impulse and its execu
tion would be alike destitute of importance. It
would matter nothing how chaotic or how orderly
the world became, or what animal bodies arose or
perished there; any tendencies afoot in nature,
whatever they might construct or dissolve, would
involve no progress or disaster, since no prefer
ences would exist to pronounce one eventual state
of things better than another. These preferences
and are in themselves, if the dynamic order

transcendent, alone be considered, works of superero
gation, expressing force but not producing it, like
a statue of Hercules; but the principle of such
preferences, the force they express and depend
upon, is jLQme mechanical impulse itself involved
in the causal process. Expression gives value to
power, and the strength of Hercules would have
no virtue in it had it contributed nothing to art
and civilisation. That conceived basis of all life
which we call matter would be a mere potentiality,
an inferred instrument deprived of its func
tion, if it did not actually issue in life and con-

222 THE LIFE OF REASON

sciousness. What gives the material world a legit
imate status and perpetual pertinence in human
discourse is the conscious life it supports and car
ries in its own direction, as a ship carries its pas
sengers or rather as a passion carries its hopes.
Conscious interests first justify and moralise the
, mechanisms they express. Eventual satisfac
tions, while their form and possibility must be de
termined by animal tendencies, alone render these
tendencies vehicles of the good. The direction in
which benefit shall lie must be determined by irra
tional impulse^ but the attainment of benefit con
sists in crowning that impulse with its ideal
achievement. Nature dictates what men shall
seek and prompts them to seek it; a possibility of
happiness is thus generated and only its fulfil
ment would justify nature and man in their com
mon venture.

it is the seat Satisfaction is the touchstone of
of value. value; without reference to it all talk
about good and evil, progress or decay, is mere
ly confused verbiage, pure sophistry in which
the juggler adroitly withdraws attention from
what works the wonder namely, that human
and moral colouring to which the terms he plays
with owe whatever efficacy they have. Metaphy
sicians sometimes so define the good as to make
it a matter of no importance ; not seldom they give
that name to the sum of all evils. A good,
absolute in the sense of being divorced from all
natural demand and all possible satisfaction, would

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 223

be as remote as possible from goodness: to call it
good is mere disloyalty to morals, brought about
by some fantastic or dialectical passion. In ex
cellence there is an essential bias, an opposition
to the possible opposite; this bias expresses a
mechanical impulse, a situation that has stirred
the senses and the will. Impulse makes value pos
sible; and the value becomes actual when the im
pulse issues in processes that give it .satisfaction
and have a conscious worth. 1 Character is the
basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of
character.*

That thought is nature s concomitant expres
sion or entelechy, never one of her instruments,
is a truth long ago divined by the more judicious
thinkers, like Aristotle and Spinoza ; but it has not
met with general acceptance or even consideration.
It is obstructed by superficial empiricism, which
associates the better-known aspects of events di
rectly together, without considering what mechani-

* Aristippus asked Socrates " whether he knew any
thing good, so that if he answered by naming food or drink
or money or health or strength or valour or anything of that
sort, lie might at once show that it was sometimes an evil.
Socrates, however, knew very well that if anything troubles
us what we demand is its cure, and he replied in the most
pertinent fashion. Are you asking me, he said, if I know
anything good for a fever ? Oh, no, said the other. Or
for sore eyes ? Not that, either. Or for hunger ? No,
not for hunger. Well, then, said he, if you ask me
whether I know a good that is. good for nothing, I neither
know it nor want to know it " Xenophon, Memorabilia,
iii., 8.

224 THE LIFE OF KEASON

cal bonds may secretly unite them ; it is obstruct
ed also by the traditional mythical idealism, in
tent as this philosophy is on proving nature to
be the expression of something ulterior and non-
natural and on hugging the fatal misconception
that ideals and eventual goods are creative and
miraculous forces, without perceiving that it
thereby renders goods and ideals perfectly sense
less; for how can anything be a good at all to
which some existing nature is not already directed ?
It may therefore be worth while, before leaving
this phase of the subject, to consider one or two
prejudices which might make it sound paradoxi
cal to say, as we propose, that ideals are ideal and
nature natural.

Apparent Of all forms of consciousness the

utility of pain. one apparently most useful is pain,
which is also the one most immersed in matter
and most opposite to ideality and excellence. Its
utility lies in the warning it gives: in trying to
escape pain we escape destruction. That we de
sire to escape pain is certain; its very definition
can hardly go beyond the statement that pain is
that element of feeling which we seek to abolish on
account of its intrinsic quality. That this desire,
however, should know how to initiate remedial
action is a notion contrary to experience and in
itself unthinkable. If pain could have cured us we
should long ago have been saved. The bitterest
quintessence of pain is its helplessness, and our
incapacity to abolish it. The most intolerable

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 225

torments are those we feel gaining upon us, in
tensifying and prolonging themselves indefinitely.
its real This baffling quality, so conspicuous in

impotence. extreme agony, is present in all pain
and is perhaps its essence. If we sought to de
scribe by a circumlocution what is of course a
primary sensation, we might scarcely do better
than to say that pain is consciousness at once in
tense and empty, fixing attention on what con
tains no character, and arrests all satisfactions
without offering anything in exchange. The hor
ror of pain lies in its intolerable intensity and its
intolerable tedium. Tt can accordingly be cured
either by sleep or by entertainment. In itself it
has no resource; its violence is quite helpless and
its vacancy offers no expedients by which it might
be unknotted and relieved.

Pain is not only impotent in itself but is a sign
of impotence in the sufferer. Its appearance, far
from constituting its own remedy, is like all other
organic phenomena subject to the law of inertia
and tends only to its own continuance. A man s
hatred of his own condition no more helps to im
prove it than hatred of other people tends to im
prove them. If we allowed ourselves to speak in
such a case of efficacy at all, we should say that
pain perpetuates and propagates itself in various
ways, now by weakening the system, now by
prompting convulsive efforts, now by spreading to
other beings through the contagion of sympathy
or vengeance. In fact, however, it merely betrays

VOL. L-15

226 THE LIFE OF REASON

a maladjustment which has more or less natural
stability. It may be instantaneous only; by its
lack of equilibrium it may involve the immediate
destruction of one of its factors. In that case we
fabulously say that the pain has instinctively re
moved its own cause. Pain is here apparently
useful because it expresses an incipient tension
which the self-preserving forces in the organism
are sufficient to remove. Pain s appearance is then
the sign for its instant disappearance; not indeed
by virtue of its inner nature or of any art it can
initiate, but merely by virtue of mechanical asso
ciations between its cause and its remedy. The
burned child dreads the fire and, reading only the
surface of his life, fancies that the pain once felt
and still remembered is the ground of his new
prudence. Punishments, however, are not always
efficacious, as everyone knows who has tried to
govern children or cities by the rod ; suffering does
not bring wisdom nor even memory, unless intelli
gence and docility are already there; that is, unless
the friction which the pain betrayed sufficed to
obliterate permanently one of the impulses in con
flict. This readjustment, on which real improve
ment hangs and which alone makes " experience "
useful, does not correspond to the intensity or repe
tition of the pains endured; it corresponds rather
to such a plasticity in the organism that the pain
ful conflict is no longer produced.
Preformations Threatened destruction would not
involved. involve pain unless that threatened de-

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 227

struction were being resisted ; so that the reaction
which pain is supposed to cause must already be
taking place before pain_can-ba-:folt. A will with
out direction cannot be thwarted; so that inhibi
tion cannot be the primary source of any effort or
of any ideal. Determinate impulses must exist
already for their inhibition to have taken place or
for the pain to arise which is the sign of that
inhibition. The child s dread of the fire marks
the acceleration of that impulse which, when he
was burned, originally enabled him to withdraw
his hand ; and if he did not now shrink in antici
pation he would not remember the pain nor know
to what to attach his terror. Sight now suffices to
awaken the reaction which touch at first was
needed to produce; the will has extended its line
of battle and thrown out its scouts farther afield ;
and pain has been driven back to the frontiers of
the spirit. The conflicting reactions are now
peripheral and feeble; the pain involved in aver
sion is nothing to that once involved in the burn.
Had this aversion to fire been innate, as many
aversions are, no pain would have been caused,
because no profound maladjustment would have
occurred. The surviving attraction, checked by
fear, is a remnant of the old disorganisation in
the brain which was the seat of conflicting re
actions.

To say that this conflict is the guide to its
own issue is to talk without thinking. The con
flict is the sign of inadequate organisation, or of

228 THE LIFE OF EEASON

non-adaptation in the given organism to the vari
ous stimuli which irritate it. The reconstruction

Its untoward which follows this Conflict, When it in
significance, deed follows, is of course a new and
better adaptation; so that what involves the
pain may often be a process of training which
directs reaction into new and smoother channels.
But the pain is present whether a permanent ad
aptation is being attained or not. It is present
in progressive dissolution and in hopeless and ex
hausting struggles far more than in education or
in profitable correction. Toothache and sea-sick
ness, birth-pangs and melancholia are not useful
ills. The intenser the pain the more probable its
uselessness. Only in vanishing is it a sign of
progress; in occurring it is an omen of defeat,
just as disease is an omen of death, although, for
those diseased already, medicine and convalescence
may be approaches to health again. Where a
man s nature is out of gear and his instincts are
inordinate, suffering may be a sign that a danger
ous peace, in which impulse was carrying him
ignorantly into paths without issue, is giving place
to a peace with security in which his reconstructed
character may respond without friction to the
world, and enable him to gather a clearer experi
ence and enjoy a purer vitality. The utility of
pain is thus apparent only, and due to empirical
haste in collating events that have no regular nor
inward relation; and even this imputed utility
pain has only in proportion to the worthlessness of
those who need it.

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 229
A second current prejudice which

Perfect func
tion not un- may deserve notice suggests that an

organ, when its function is perfect,
becomes unconscious, so that if adaptation were
complete life would disappear. The well-learned
routine of any mechanical art passes into habit,
and habit into unconscious operation. The vir
tuoso is not aware how he manipulates his instru
ment ; what was conscious labour in the beginning
has become instinct and miracle in the end. Thus
it might appear that to eliminate friction and diffi
culty would be to eliminate consciousness, and
therefore value, from the world. Life would thus
be involved in a contradiction and moral effort in
an absurdity; for while the constant aim of prac
tice is perfection and that of labour ease, and both
are without meaning or standard unless directed
to the attainment of these ends, yet such attain
ment, if it were actual, would be worthless, so
that what alone justifies effort would lack justifi
cation and would in fact be incapable of exist
ence. The good musician must strive to play per
fectly, but, alas, we are told, if he succeeded he
would have become an automaton. The good man
must aspire to holiness, but, alas, if he reached
holiness his moral life would have evaporated.

These melodramatic prophecies, however, need
not alarm us. They are founded on nothing but
rhetoric and small allegiance to any genuine good.
When we attain perfection of function we lose
consciousness of the medium, to become more

230 THE LIFE OF KEASON

clearly conscious of the result. The eye that does
its duty gives no report of itself and has no sense
of muscular tension or weariness; but it gives all
the brighter and steadier image of the object seen.
Consciousness is not lost when focussed, and the
labour of vision is abolished in its fruition. So the
musician, could he play so divinely as to be un
conscious of his body, his instrument, and the very
lapse of time, would be only the more absorbed in
the harmony, more completely master of its uni
ties and beauty. At such moments the body s
long labour at last brings "forth the soul. Life
from its inception is simply some partial natural
harmony raising its voice and bearing witness to
its own existence; to_^ej:j^ct~liiatJiarnioiiy is to
round out and intensify that life. This is the
very secret of power, of joy, of intelligence. Not
to have understood it is to have passed through
life without understanding anything.

The analogy extends to morals, where also the
means may be advantageously forgotten when the
end has been secured. That leisure to which work
is directed and that perfection in which virtue
would be fulfilled are so far from being apathetic
that they are states of pure activity, by containing
which other acts are rescued from utter passivity
and unconsciousness. Impure feeling ranges
between two extremes : absolute want and com
plete satisfaction. The former limit is reached
in anguish, madness, or the agony of death, when
the accidental flux of things in contradiction has

71

HOW THOUGHT IS PKACTICAL 231

reached its maximum or vanishing point, so that
the contradiction and the flux themselves disappear
by diremption. Such feeling denotes inward dis
organisation and a hopeless conflict of reflex
actions tending toward dissolution. The second
limit is reached in contemplation, when anything
is loved, understood, or enjoyed. SyiiUmliu power
is then at its height ; the mind can survey its ex
perience and correlate all the motions it suggests.
Power in the mind is exactly proportionate to
representative scope, and representative scope to
rational activity. A steady vision of all things
in their true order and worth (results from per
fection of f unction and is its index ; it secures the
greatest distinctness in thought together with the
greatest decision, wisdom, and ease in action, as
the lightning is brilliant and quick. It also
secures, so far as human energies avail, its own
perpetuity, since what is perfectly adjusted within
and without lasts long and goes far.
inchoate ethics. To confuse means with ends and
mistake disorder for vitality is not unnatural to
minds that hear the hum of mighty workings but
can imagine neither the cause nor the fruits of
that portentous commotion. All functions, in
such chaotic lives, seem instrumental functions.
It is then supposed that what serves no further
purpose can have no value, and that he who
suffers no offuscation can have no feeling and
no life. To attain an ideal seems to destroy
its worth. Moral life, at that low level, is a

232 THE LIFE OF KEASON

fantastic game only, not having come in sight
of humane and liberal interests. The barba
rian s intensity is without seriousness and his
passion without joy. His philosophy, which
means to glorify all experience and to digest
all vice, is in truth an expression of pathetic in
nocence. It betrays a rudimentary impulse to fol
low every beckoning hand, to assume that no ad
venture and no bewitchment can be anything but
glorious. Such an attitude is intelligible in one
who has never seen anything worth seeing nor
loved anything worth loving. Immaturity could
go no farther than to acknowledge no limits de
fining will and happiness. When such limits,
however, are gradually discovered and an authori
tative ideal is born of the marriage of human
nature with experience, happiness becomes at once
definite and attainable; for adjustment is pos
sible to a world that has a fruitful and intelligible
structure.

Such incoherences, which might well arise in
ages without traditions, may be preserved and fos
tered by superstition. Perpetual servile employ
ments and subjection to an irrational society may
render people incapable even of conceiving a lib
eral life. They may come to think their happi
ness no longer separable from their misery and
to fear the large emptiness, as they deem it, of a
happy world. Like the prisoner of Chillon, after
so long a captivity, they would regain their free
dom with a sigh. The wholesome influences of

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 233

nature, "however., would soon revive their wills,
contorted by unnatural oppression, and a vision
of perfection would arise within them upon breath
ing a purer air. Freedom and perfection are
synonymous with life. The peace they bring is one

whose names are also rapture, power,
Clear sight, and love; for these are parts of peace.

Thou ht the Thought belongs to the sphere of
enteiechy ultimate results. What, indeed, could
of being. ke more fitting than that conscious
ness, which is self -revealing and transcendentally
primary, should be its own excuse for being and
should contain its own total value, together with
the total value of everything else? What could
be more proper than that the whole worth of ideas
should be ideal? To make an idea instrumental
would be to prostitute what, being self-existent,
should be self-justifying. That continual abso
luteness which consciousness possesses, since in it
alone all heaven and earth are at any moment re
vealed, ought to convince any radical and heart-
searching philosopher that all values should be
continually integrated and realised there, where
all energies are being momently focussed.
Thought is a fulfilment; its function is to lend
utility to its causes and to make actual those con
ceived and subterranean processes which find in
it their ultimate expression. Thought is nature
represented; it is, potential energy producing life
and becoming an actual appearance.

234 THE LIFE OF KEASON

The conditions of consciousness, however, are
far from being its only theme. As consciousness
its exuberance, bears a transcendent relation to the
dynamic world (for it is actual and spiritual,
while the dynamic is potential and material) so
it may be exuberant and irresponsibly rich.
Although its elements, in point of distribution and
derivation, are grounded in matter, as music is
in vibrations, yet in point of character the result
may be infinitely redundant. The complete musi
cian would devote but a small part of his attention
to the basis of music, its mechanism, psychology,
or history. Long before he had represented to his
mind the causes of his art, he would have pro
ceeded to practise and enjoy it. So sense and im
agination, passion and reason, may enrich the soil
that breeds them and cover it with a maze of
flowers.

The theme of consciousness is accordingly far
more than the material world which constitutes
its basis, though this also is one of its themes;
thought is no less at home in various expres
sions and embroideries with which the material
world can be overlaid in imagination. The mate
rial world is conceived by digging beneath experi
ence to find its cause ; it is the efficacious structure
and skeleton of things. This is the subject of
scientific retrospect and calculation. The forces
disclosed by physical studies are of course not
directed to producing a mind that might merely
describe them. A force is expressed in many other

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL 235

ways than by being defined; it may be felt, re
sisted, embodied, transformed, or symbolised.
Forces work ; they are not, like mathematical con
cepts, exhausted in description. From that mat
ter which might be describable in mechanical
formulae there issue notwithstanding all manner
of forms and harmonies, visible, audible, imagin
able, and passionately prized. Every phase of the
ideal world emanates from the natural and loudly
proclaims its origin by the interest it takes in
natural existences, of which it gives a rational in
terpretation. Sense, art, religion, society, express
nature exuberantly and in symbols long before
science is added to represent, by a different ab
straction, the mechanism which nature contains.

CHAPTER X

THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION

Honesty in To put value in pleasure and pain,

hedonism. regarding a given quantity of pain
as balancing a given quantity of pleasure, is to
bring to practical ethics a worthy intention to be
clear and, what is more precious, an undoubted
honesty not always found in those moralists who
maintain the opposite opinion and care more for
edification than for truth. For in spite of all
logical and psychological scruples, conduct that
should not justify itself somehow by the satisfac
tions secured and the pains avoided would not
justify itself at all. The most instinctive and
unavoidable desire is forthwith chilled if you dis
cover that its ultimate end is to be a preponder
ance of suffering; and what arrests this desire is
not fear or weakness but conscience in its most
categorical and sacred guise. Who would not be
ashamed to acknowledge or to propose so inhuman
an action?

By sad experience rooted impulses may be
transformed or even obliterated. And quite intel
ligibly: for the idea of pain is already the sign
and the beginning of a certain stoppage. To
236

MEASURE OF VALUES 237

imagine failure is to interpret ideally a felt in
hibition. To prophesy a check would be impos
sible but for an incipient movement already meet
ing an incipient arrest. Intensified, this prophecy
becomes its own fulfilment and totally inhibits
the opposed tendency. Therefore a mind that
foresees pain to be the ultimate result of action
cannot continue unreservedly to act, seeing that
its foresight is the conscious transcript of a recoil
already occurring. Conversely, the mind that
surrenders itself wholly to any impulse must think
that its execution would be delightful. A per
fectly wise and representative will, therefore,
would aim only at what, in its attainment, could
continue to be aimed at and approved; and this
is another way of saying that its aim would secure
the maximum of satisfaction eventually possible.
Necessary I n spite, however, of this involution

qualifications. O f p a in and pleasure in all deliberate
forecast and volition, pain and pleasure are not
the ultimate sources of value. A correct psychol
ogy and logic cannot allow that an eventual and,
in strictness, unpresentable feeling, can determine
any act or volition, but must insist that, on the
contrary, all beliefs about future experience, with
all premonition of its emotional quality, is based
on actual impulse and feeling; so that the source
of value is nothing but the inner fountain of life
and imagination, and the object of pursuit noth
ing but the ideal object, counterpart of the pres
ent demand. Abstract satisfaction is not pursued,

238 THE LIFE OF REASON

but., if the will and the environment are constant,
satisfaction will necessarily be felt in achieving
the object desired. A rejection of hedonistic
psychology, therefore, by no means involves any
opposition to eudaemonism in ethics. Euda3mon-
ism is another name for wisdom : there is no other
moral morality. Any system that, for some sinis
ter reason, should absolve itself from good-will
toward all creatures, and make it somehow a duty
to secure their misery, would be clearly disloyal
to reason, humanity, and justice. Nor would it
be hard, in that case, to point out what supersti
tion, what fantastic obsession, or what private fury,
had made those persons blind to prudence and
kindness in so plain a matter. Happiness is the
only sanction of life; where happiness fails, ex
istence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
The question, however, what happiness shall con
sist in, its complexion if it should once arise, can
only be determined by reference to natural de
mands and capacities; so that while satisfaction
by the attainment of ends can alone justify their
pursuit, this pursuit itself must exist first and be
spontaneous, thereby fixing the goals of endeavour
and distinguishing the states in which satisfaction
might be found.. Natural disposition, therefore,
is the principle of preference and makes morality
and happiness possible.

The win must The standard of value, like every
judge. standard, must be one. Pleasures and

pains are not only infinitely diverse but, even if

MEASURE OF VALUES 239

reduced to their total bulk and abstract opposi
tion, they remain two. Their values must be
compared, and obviously neither one can be the
standard by which to judge the other. This
standard is an ideal involved in the judgment
passed, whatever that judgment may be. Thus
when Petrarch says that a thousand pleasures
are not worth one pain, he establishes an ideal
of value deeper than either pleasure or pain, an
ideal which makes a life of satisfaction marred by
a single pang an offence and a horror to his soul.
If our demand for rationality is less acute and
the miscellaneous affirmations of the will carry us
along with a well-fed indifference to some single
tragedy within us, we may aver that a single pang
is only the thousandth part of a thousand pleas
ures and that a life so balanced is nine hundred
and ninety-nine times better than nothing. This
judgment, for all its air of mathematical calcu
lation, in truth expresses a choice as irrational as
Petrarch s. It merely means that, as a matter of
fact, the mixed prospect presented to us attracts
our wills and attracts them vehemently. So that
the only possible criterion for the relative values,
of pains and pleasures is the will that chooses
among them or Rmong combinations of them ; nor
can the intensity of pleasures and pains, apart
from the physical violence of their expression, be
judged by any other standard than by the power
they have, when represented, to control the will s
movement.

240 THE LIFE OF EEASON

Here we come upon one of those

Injustice

inherent in initial irrationalities in the world

representation. wMch theories O f all sorts? gince they

are attempts to find rationality in things, are in
serious danger of overlooking. In estimating the
value of any experience, our endeavour, our pre
tension, is to weigh the value which that experi
ence possesses when it is actual. But to weigh
is to compare, and to compare is to represent, since
the transcendental isolation and self-sufficiency of
actual experience precludes its lying side by side
with another datum, like two objects given in
a single consciousness. Successive values, to be
compared, must be represented ; but the conditions
of representation are such that they rob objects
of the values they had at their first appearance
to substitute the values they possess at their re
currence. For representation mirrors conscious
ness only by mirroring its objects, and the emo
tional reaction upon those objects cannot be
represented directly, but is approached by indirect
methods, through an imitation or assimilation of
will to will and emotion to emotion. Only by the
instrumentality of signs, like gesture or language,
can we bring ourselves to reproduce in some meas
ure an absent experience and to feel some premoni
tion of its absolute value. Apart from very elab
orate and cumulative suggestions to the contrary,
we should always attribute to an event in every
other experience the value which its image now
had in our own. But in that case the pathetic

MEASUKE OF VALUES 241

fallacy would be present; for a volitional reaction
upon an idea in one vital context is no index to
what the volitional reaction would be in another
vital context upon the situation which that idea
represents.

jEsthetic and ^^ s divergence falsifies all repre-
specuiative sentation of life and renders it initially
cruelty. cruel, sentimental, and mythical. We

dislike to trample on a flower, because its form
makes a kind of blossoming in our own fancy
which we call beauty; but we laugh at pangs we
endured in childhood and feel no tremor at the
incalculable sufferings of all mankind beyond our
horizon, because no imitable image is involved to
start a contrite thrill in our own bosom. The
same cruelty appears in aesthetic pleasures, in
lust, war, and ambition; in the illusions of desire
and memory; in the uns}^mpathetic quality of
theory everywhere, which regards the uniformi
ties of cause and effect and the beauties of law
as a justification for the inherent evils in the ex
perience described; in the unjust judgments,
finally, of mystical optimism, that sinks so com
pletely into its subjective commotion as to mistake
the suspension of all discriminating and represen
tative faculties for a true union in things, and
the blur of its own ecstasy for a universal glory.
These pleasures are all on the sensuous plane, the
plane of levity and unintentional wickedness; but
in their own sphere they have their own value.
Esthetic and speculative emotions make an im-
VOL. L 16

242 THE LIFE OF REASON

portant contribution to the total worth of exist
ence, but they do not abolish the evils of that ex
perience on which they reflect with such ruthless
satisfaction. The satisfaction is due to a private
flood of emotion submerging the images present in
fancy, or to the exercise of a new intellectual func
tion, like that of abstraction, synthesis, or com
parison. Such a faculty, when fully developed,
is capable of yielding pleasures as intense and
voluminous as those proper to rudimentary ani
mal functions,, wrongly supposed to be more vital.
The acme of vitality lies in truth in the most
comprehensive and penetrating thought. The
rhythms, the sweep, the impetuosity of impassioned
contemplation not only contain in themselves a
great vitality and potency, but they often succeed
in engaging the lower functions in a sympathetic
vibration, and we see the whole body and soul rapt,
as we say, and borne along by the harmonies of
imagination and thought. In these fugitive
moments of intoxication the detail of truth is sub
merged and forgotten. < The emotions which
would be suggested by tlie parts are replaced by
the rapid emotion of transition between them ; and
this exhilaration in survey, this mountain-top ex
perience, is supposed to be also the truest vision
of reality. Absorption in a supervening function
is mistaken for comprehension of all fact, and this
inevitably, since all consciousness of particular
facts and of their values is then submerged in the
torrent of cerebral excitement.

MEASUKE OF VALUES 243

That luminous blindness which in

Imputed

values: their these cases takes an extreme form is
inconstancy. pre g en t j n principle throughout all re
flection. We tend to regard our own past as good
only when we still find some value in the memory
of it. Last year, last week,, even the feelings of
the last five minutes, are not otherwise prized than
by the pleasure we may still have in recalling
them; the pulsations of pleasure or pain which
they contained we do not even seek to remember
or to discriminate. The period is called happy or
unhappy merely as its ideal representation exer
cises fascination or repulsion over the present will.
Hence the revulsion after physical indulgence,
often most violent when the pleasure judged by
its concomitant expression and by the desire that
heralded it was most intense. For the strongest
passions are intermittent, so that the unspeakable
charm which their objects possess for a moment is
lost immediately and becomes unintelligible to a
chilled and cheated reflection. The situation,
when iyet unrealised, irresistibly solicited the will
and seemed to promise incomparable ecstasy; and
perhaps it yields an indescribable moment of ex
citement and triumph a moment only half-appro
priated into waking experience, so fleeting is it,
and so unfit the mind to possess or retain its
tenser attitudes. The same situation, if revived
in memory when the system is in an opposite
and relaxed state, forfeits all power to attract
and fills the mind rather with aversion and dis-

244 THE LIFE OF REASON

gust. For all violent pleasures, as Shakespeare
says, are cruel and not to be trusted.

A bliss in proof and, proved, a very woe :
Before, a joy proposed ; behind, a dream . . .
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated. C 0Vrv^?f* / Z f .

Methods of P as t reason, indeed. For although
control. an impulsive injustice is inherent in

the very nature of representation and cannot be
overcome altogether, yet reason, by attending to
all the evidences that can be gathered and by con
fronting the first pronouncement by others fetched
from every quarter of experience, has power to
minimise the error and reach a practically just
estimate of absent values . This achieved right-
ness can be tested by comparing two experiences,
each when it is present, with the same conventional
permanent object chosen to be their expression.
A love-song, for instance, can be pronounced ade
quate or false by various lovers; and it can thus
remain a sort of index to the fleeting sentiments
once confronted with it. Eeason has, to be sure,
no independent method of discovering values.
They must be rated- as the sensitive balance of
present inclination, when completely laden, shows
them to stand. In estimating values reason is
reduced to data furnished by the mechanical proc
esses of ideation and instinct, as in framing all
knowledge; an absent joy can only be represented
by a tinge of emotion dyeing an image that pictures

MEASURE OF VALUES 245

.the situation in which the joy was felt; but the
suggested value being once projected into the
potential world, that land of inferred being, this
projection may be controlled and corroborated by
other suggestions and associations relevant to it,
which it is the function of reason to collect and
compare. A right estimate of absent values must
be conventional and mediated by signs. Direct
sympathies, which suffice for instinctive present
co-operation, fail to transmit alien or opposite
pleasures. They over-emphasise momentary rela
tions, while they necessarily ignore permanent
bonds. Therefore the same intellect that puts a
mechanical reality behind perception must put a
moral reality behind sympathy.
Example of Fame, for example, is a good; its
fame. value arises from a certain movement

of will and emotion which is elicited by the
thought that one s name might be associated with
great deeds and with the memory of them. The
glow of this thought bathes the object it describes,
so that fame is felt to have a value quite distinct
from that which the expectation of fame may have
in the present moment. Should this expectation
be foolish and destined to prove false, it would
have no value, and be indeed the more ludicrous
and repulsive the more pleasure its dupe took in
it, and the longer his illusion lasted. The heart
is resolutely set on its object and despises its own
phenomena, not reflecting that its emotions have
first revealed that object s worth and alone can

246 THE LIFE OF KEASON

maintain it. For if a man cares nothing for
fame,, what value has it? !

This projection of interest into excellence
takes place mechanically and is in the first
instance irrational. Did all glow die out from
memory and expectation,, the events represented
remaining unchanged, we should be incapable
of assigning any value to those events, just
as, if eyes were lacking, we should be in
capable of assigning colour to the world, which
would, notwithstanding, remain as it is at pres
ent. So fame could never be regarded as a good
if the idea of fame gave no pleasure; yet now,
because the idea pleases, the reality is regarded as
a good, absolute and intrinsic. This moral hypos-
tasis involved in the love of fame could never be
rationalised, but would subsist unmitigated or die
out unobserved, were it not associated with other
conceptions and other habits of estimating values.
For the passions are humanised only by being
juxtaposed and forced to live together. As fame
is not man s only goal and the realisation of it
comes into manifold relations with other interests
no less vivid, we are able to criticise the impulse
to pursue it.

Fame may be the consequence of benefits con
ferred upon mankind. In that case the ab
stract desire for fame would be reinforced and,
as it were, justified by its congruity with the
more voluminous and stable desire to benefit our
fellow-men. Or, again, the achievements which

MEASURE OF VALUES 247

insure fame and the genius that wins it probably
involve a high degree of vitality and many pro
found inward satisfactions to the man <?f genius
himself; so that again the abstract love of fame
would be reinforced by the independent and more
rational desire for a noble and comprehensive ex
perience. On the other hand, the minds of pos
terity, whose homage is craved by the ambitious
man, will probably have very false conceptions of
his thoughts and purposes. What they will call
by his name will be, in a great measure, a fiction
of their own fancy and not his portrait at all.
Would Caesar recognise himself in the current
notions of him, drawn from some school-history,
or perhaps from Shakespeare s satirical portrait?
Would Christ recognise himself upon our altars,
or in the romances about him constructed by im
aginative critics ? And not only is remote experi
ence thus hopelessly lost and misrepresented, but
even this nominal memorial ultimately disappears.
The love of fame, if tempered by these and simi
lar considerations, would tend to take a place in
man s ideal such as its roots in human nature and
its functions in human progress might seem to
justify. It would be rationalised in the only
sense in which any primary desire can be rational
ised, namely, by being combined with all others
in a consistent whole. How much of it would sur
vive a thorough sifting and criticism, may well
remain in doubt. The result would naturally dif
fer for different temperaments and in different

248 THE LIFE OF EEASON

states of society. The wisest men, perhaps, while
they would continue to feel some love of honour
and some interest in their image in other minds,
would yet wish that posterity might praise them
as Sallust praises Cato by saying: Esse quam
videri bonus maluit; he preferred worth to repu
tation.

The fact that value is attributed to

Disproportion
ate interest in absent experience according to the
the aesthetic. va j ue experience has in representation
appears again in one of the most curious anoma
lies in human life the exorbitant interest which
thought and reflection take in the form of experi
ence and the slight account they make of its in
tensity or volume. Sea-sickness and child-birth
when they are over, the pangs of despised love
when that love is finally forgotten or requited, the
travail of sin when once salvation is assured, all
melt away and dissolve like a morning mist leav
ing a clear sky without a vestige of sorrow. So
also with merely remembered and not reproduc
ible pleasures; the buoyancy of youth, when ab
surdity is not yet tedious, the rapture of sport
or passion, the immense peace found in a mysti
cal surrender to the universal, all these generous
ardours count for nothing when they are once gone.
The memory of them cannot cure a fit of the blues
nor raise an irritable mortal above some petty
act of malice or vengeance, or reconcile him to
foul weather. An ode of Horace, on the other
hand, a scientific monograph, or a well-written

MEASURE OF VALUES 249

page of music is a better antidote to melancholy
than thinking on all the happiness which one s
own life or that of the universe may ever have
contained. Why should overwhelming masses of
suffering and joy affect imagination so little while
it responds sympathetically to aesthetic and intel
lectual irritants of very slight intensity, objects
that, it must be confessed, are of almost no impor
tance to the welfare of mankind ? Why should we
be so easily awed by artistic genius and exalt men
whose works we know only by name, perhaps, and
whose influence upon society has been infinitesimal,
like a Pindar or a Leonardo, while we regard great
merchants and inventors as ignoble creatures in
comparison ? Why should we smile at the inscrip
tion in Westminster Abbey which calls the inventor
of the spinning-jenny one of the true benefactors
of mankind? Is it not probable, on the whole,
that he has had a greater and less equivocal in
fluence on human happiness than Shakespeare
with all his plays and sonnets? But the cheap
ness of cotton cloth produces no particularly de
lightful image in the fancy to be compared with ,
Hamlet or Imogen. There is a prodigious selfish- !
ness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and in
vulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

The same aesthetic bias appears in the moral
sphere. Utilitarians have attempted to show that
the human conscience commends precisely those
actions which tend to secure general happiness
and that the notions of justice and virtue pre-

250 THE LIFE OF REASON

vailing in any age vary with its social economy
and the prizes it is able to attain. And, if due
allowance is made for the complexity of the sub
ject, we may reasonably admit that the precepts
of obligatory morality bear this relation to the
general welfare; thus virtue means courage in a
soldier, probity in a merchant, and chastity in a
woman. But if we turn from the morality re
quired of all to the type regarded as perfect and
ideal, we find no such correspondence to the bene
fits involved. The selfish imagination intervenes
here and attributes an absolute and irrational value
to those figures that entertain it with the most
irrational absorbing and dreamful emotions,
religious The character of Christ, for instance,
allegiance. which e ven the least orthodox among
us are in the habit of holding up as a perfect
model, is not the character of a benefactor but of
a martyr, a spirit from a higher world lacerated
in its passage through this uncomprehending and
perverse existence, healing and forgiving out of
sheer compassion, sustained by his inner affinities
to the supernatural, and absolutely disenchanted
with all earthly or political goods. Christ did not
suffer, like Prometheus, for having bestowed or
wished to bestow any earthly blessing: the only
blessing he bequeathed was the image of himself
upon the cross, whereby men might be comforted
in their own sorrows, rebuked in their worldliness.
driven to put their trust in the supernatural, and
united, by their common indifference to the world,

MEASURE OF VALUES 251

in one mystic brotherhood. As men learned these
lessons, or were inwardly ready to learn them,
they recognised more and more clearly in Jesus
their heaven-sent redeemer, and in following their
own conscience and desperate idealism into the
desert or the cloister, in ignoring all civic virtues
and allowing the wealth, art, and knowledge of
the pagan world to decay, they began what they
felt to be an imitation of Christ.

All natural impulses, all natural ideals, subsisted
of course beneath this theoretic asceticism, writhed
under its unearthly control, and broke out in fre
quent violent irruptions against it in the life of
each man as well as in the course of history. Yet
the image of Christ remained in men s hearts and
retained its marvellous authority, so that even now,
when so many who call themselves Christians, be
ing pure children of nature, are without the least
understanding of what Christianity came to do in
the world, they still offer his person and words a
sincere if inarticulate worship, trying to transform
that sacrificial and crucified spirit, as much as
their bungling fancy can, into a patron of Philis-
tia Felix. Why this persistent adoration of a char
acter that is the extreme negation of all that these
good souls inwardly value and outwardly pursue?
Because the image of Christ and the associations
of his religion, apart from their original import,
remain rooted in the mind : they remain the focus
for such wayward emotions and mystic intuitions
as their magnetism can still attract, and the value

252 THE LIFE OF REASON

which this hallowed compound possesses in repre
sentation is transferred to its nominal object, and
Christ is the conventional name for all the im
pulses of religion, no matter how opposite to the
Christian.

Symbols, when their significance has been great,
outlive their first significance. The image of
Christ was a last refuge to the world; it was
a consolation and a new ground for hope, from
which no misfortune could drive the worship
per. Its value as an idea was therefore im
mense, as to the lover the idea of his untasted
joys, or to the dying man the idea of health and
invigorating sunshine. The votary can no more
pathetic as ^ himself whether his deity, in its
idealizations, total operation, has really blessed him
and deserved his praise than the lover can ask if
his lady is worth pursuing or the expiring crip
ple whether it would be, in very truth, a benefit
to be once more young and whole. That life is
worth living is the most necessary of assumptions
and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of
conclusions. Experience, by its passive weight of
joy and sorrow, can neither inspire nor prevent
enthusiasm ; only a present ideal will avail to move
the will and, if realised, to justify it. A saint s
halo is an optical illusion; it glorifies his actions
whatever their eventual influence in the world,
because they seem to have, when rehearsed dramat
ically, some tenderness or rapture or miracle about
them.

MEASURE OF VALUES 253

Thus it appears that the great figures of art or
religion, together with all historic and imaginative
ideals, advance insensibly on the values they rep
resent. The image has more lustre than the orig
inal, and is often the more important and influen
tial fact. Things are esteemed as they weigh in
representation. A memorable thing, people say in
their eulogies, little thinking to touch the ground
of their praise. For things are called great
because they are memorable, they are not remem
bered because they were great. The deepest
pangs, the highest joys, the widest influences are
lost to apperception in its haste, and if in some
rational moment reconstructed and acknowledged,
are soon forgotten again and cut off from living
consideration. But the emptiest experience, even
the most pernicious tendency, if embodied in a
picturesque image, if reverberating in the mind
with a pleasant echo, is idolised and enshrined.
Fortunate indeed was Achilles that Homer sang
of him, and fortunate the poets that make a pub
lic titillation out of their sorrows and ignorance.
This imputed and posthumous fortune is the
only happiness they have. The favours of memory
are extended to those feeble realities and denied
to the massive substance of daily experience.
When life dies, when what was present becomes a
memory, its ghost flits still among the living,
feared or worshipped not for the experience it
once possessed but for the aspect it now wears.
Yet this injustice in representation, speculatively

254 THE LIFE OF REASON

so offensive, is practically excusable; for it is in
one sense right and useful that all things, what
ever their original or inherent dignity, should be
valued at each moment only by their present func
tion and utility.

inevitable im ^ e error involved in attributing
puisiveness in value to the past is naturally aggra-
prophecy. V ated when values are to be assigned
to the future. In the latter case imagination can
not be controlled by circumstantial evidence, and
is consequently the only basis for judgment. But
as the conception of a thing naturally evokes an
emotion different from that involved in its pres
ence, ideals of what is desirable for the future con
tain no warrant that the experience desired would,
when actual, prove to be acceptable and good. An
ideal carries no extrinsic assurance that its realisa
tion would be a benefit. To convince ourselves
that an ideal has* rational authority and repre
sents a better experience than the actual condition
it is contrasted with, we must control the prophetic
image by as many circumlocutions as possible.
T , As in the case of fame, we must but-

ine test a

controlled tress or modify our spontaneous judg-

present ideal. ment ^^ flU the other j u( j gments t h at

the object envisaged can prompt: we must make
our ideal harmonise with all experience rather
than with a part only. The possible error re
mains even then ; but a practical mind will always
accept the risk of error when it has made every
possible correction. A rational will is not a will

MEASURE OF VALUES 255

that has reason for its basis or that possesses any
other proof that its realisation would be possible
or good than the oracle which a living will inspires
and pronounces. The rationality possible to the
will lies not in its source but in its method. An
ideal cannot wait for its realisation to prove its
validity. To deserve adhesion it needs only to be /
adequate as an ideal, that is, to express com- /
pletely what the soul at present demands, and to
do justice to all extant interests.

CHAPTER XI

SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL

The ultimate Reason s function is to embody the
enda good, but the test of excellence is itself

resultant,

ideal; therefore before we can assure
ourselves that reason has been manifested in any
given case we must make out the reasonableness
of the ideal that inspires us. And in general,
before we can convince ourselves that a Life of
Reason, or practice guided by science and directed
toward spiritual goods, is at all worth having, we
must make out the possibility and character of
its ultimate end. Yet each ideal is its own justi
fication; so that the only sense in which an ulti
mate end can be established and become a test of
general progress is this: that a harmony and co
operation of impulses should be conceived, leading
to the maximum satisfaction possible in the whole
community of spirits affected by our action.
Now, without considering for the present any con
crete Utopia, such, for instance, as Plato s Repub
lic or the heavenly beatitude described by theo
logians, we may inquire what formal qualities are
imposed on the ideal by its nature and function

256

CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL 257

and by the relation it bears to experience and to
desire.

Demands the The ideal h&S the Same Delation to

substance of given demands that the reality has to
given perceptions. In the face of the
ideal, particular demands forfeit their authority
and the goods to which a particular being may
aspire cease to be absolute; nay, the satisfaction
of desire comes to appear an indifferent or unholy
thing when compared or opposed to the ideal to
be realised. So, precisely, in perception, flying
impressions come to be regarded as illusory when
contrasted with a stable conception of reality.
Yet of course flying impressions are the only
material out of which that conception can be
formed. Life itself is a flying impression, and
had we no personal and instant experience, impor
tuning us at each successive moment, we should
have no occasion to ask for a reality at all, and
no materials out of which to construct so gratui
tous an idea. In the same way present demands
are the only materials and occasions for any ideal :
without demands the ideal would have no locus
standi or foothold in the world, no power, no
charm, and no prerogative. If the ideal can con
front particular desires and put them to shame,
that happens only because the ideal is the object
of a more profound and voluminous desire and
embodies the good which they blindly and per
haps deviously pursue. Demands could not be
misdirected, goods sought could not be false, if
VOL. L 17

258 THE LIFE OF REASON

the standard by which they are to be corrected
were not constructed out of them. Otherwise
each demand would render its object a detached,
absolute, and unimpeachable good. But when
each desire in turn has singed its wings and re
tired before some disillusion, reflection may set
in to suggest residual satisfactions that may still
be possible, or some shifting of the ground by
which much of what was hoped for may yet be
attained.

The force for this new trial is but the old
impulse renewed; this new hope is a justified
remnant of the old optimism. Each passion, in
this second campaign, takes the field conscious that
it has indomitable enemies and ready to sign a
reasonable peace, and even to capitulate before
superior forces. Such tameness may be at first
merely a consequence of exhaustion and prudence ;
but a mortal will, though absolute in its deliver
ances, is very far from constant, and its sacrifices
soon constitute a habit, its exile a new home.
The old ambition, now proved to be unrealisable,
begins to seem capricious and extravagant; the
circle of possible satisfactions becomes the field of
Discipline of conventional happiness. Experience,
the will. which brings about this humbler and

more prosaic state of mind, has its own imagina
tive fruits. Among those forces which compelled
each particular impulse to abate its pretensions,
the most conspicuous were other impulses, other
interests active in oneself and in one s neighbours.

CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL 259

When the power of these alien demands is recog
nised they begin, in a physical way, to be re
spected; when an adjustment to them is sought
they begin to be understood, for it is only by
studying their expression and tendency that the
degree of their hostility can be measured. But to
understand is more than to forgive, it is to adopt ;
and the passion that thought merely to withdraw
into a sullen and maimed self-indulgence can feel
itself expanded by sympathies which in its pri
mal vehemence it would have excluded altogether.
Experience, in bringing humility, brings intelli
gence also. Personal interests begin to seem rela
tive, factors only in a general voluminous welfare
expressed in many common institutions and arts,
moulds for whatever is communicable or rational
in every passion. Each original impulse, when
. trimmed down more or less according

Demands made

practical and to its degree of savageness, can then
consistent. inhabit the state, and every good, when
sufficiently transfigured, can be found again in the
general ideal. The factors may indeed often be
unrecognisable in the result, so much does the
process of domestication transform them; but the
interests that animated them survive this disci
pline and the new purpose is really esteemed ; else
the ideal would have no moral force. An ideal
representing no living interest would be irrelevant
to practice, just as a conception of reality would
be irrelevant to perception which should not be
composed of the materials that sense supplies, or

260 THE LIFE OF KEASON

should not re-embody actual sensations in an intel
ligible system.

The ideal Here we "have, then, one condition

natural. which the ideal must fulfil : it must be
a resultant or synthesis of impulses already afoot.
An ideal out of relation to the actual demands of
living beings is so far from being an ideal that it
is not even a good. The pursuit of it would be
not the acme but the atrophy of moral endeavour.
Mysticism and asceticism run into this danger,
when the intent to be faithful to a supreme good
too symbolically presented breeds a superstitious
repugnance toward everything naturally prized.
So also an artificial scepticism can regard all ex
perience as deceptive, by contrasting it with the
chimera of an absolute reality. As an absolute
reality would be indescribable asd without a func
tion in the elucidation of phenomena, so a supreme
good which was good for nobody would be without
conceivable value. Respect for such an idol is a
dialectical superstition; and if zeal for that shib
boleth should actually begin to inhibit the exercise
of intelligent choice or the development of appre
ciation for natural pleasures, it _would constitute
a reversal of the Life of Reason which, if persist
ently indulged in, could only issue in madness or
revert to imbecility.

Need of unity No l ess important, however, than
and finality, this basis which the ideal must have
in extant demands, is the harmony with which
reason must endow it. If without the one the

CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL 261

ideal loses its value, without the other it loses its
finality. Human nature is fluid and imperfect;
its demands are expressed in incidental desires,
elicited by a variety of objects which perhaps can
not coexist in the world. If we merely trans
cribe these miscellaneous demands or allow these
floating desires to dictate to us the elements of the
ideal-, we shall never come to a Whole or to an
End. One new fancy after another will seem an
embodiment of perfection, and we shall contradict
each expression of our ideal by every other. A
ideals of certain school of philosophy if we
nothing. m ay give that name to the systematic

neglect of reason has so immersed itself in the
contemplation of this sort of inconstancy, which is
indeed prevalent enough in the world, that it has
mistaken it for a normal and necessary process.
The greatness of the ideal has been put in its
vagueness and in an elasticity which makes it
wholly indeterminate and inconsistent. The goal
of progress, beside being thus made to lie at every
point of the compass in succession, is removed to
an infinite distance, whereby the possibility of at
taining it is denied and progress itself is made
illusory. For a progress must be directed to at
taining some definite type of life, the counterpart
of a given natural endowment, and nothing can
be called an improvement which does not contain
an appreciable benefit. A victory would be a
mockery that left us, for some new reason, as much
impeded as before and as far removed from peace.

262 THE LIFE OF EEASON

The picture of life as an eternal war for illusory
ends was drawn at first by satirists, unhappily with
too much justification in the facts. Some grosser
minds, too undisciplined to have ever pursued a
good either truly attainable or truly satisfactory,
then proceeded to mistake that satire on human
folly for a sober account of the whole universe;
and finally others were not ashamed to "represent
it as the ideal itself so soon is the dyer s hand
subdued to what it works in. A barbarous mind
cannot conceive life, like health, as a harmony
continually preserved or restored, and containing
those natural and ideal activities which disease
merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having
tasted order, cannot conceive it, and identifies
progress with new conflicts and life with continual
death. Its deification of unreason, instability,
and strife comes partly from piety and partly
from inexperience. There is piety in- saluting
nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that
since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none,
perhaps, deserves to be. There is inexperience in
not considering that wherever interests and judg
ments exist, the natural flux has fallen, so to speak,
into a vortex, and created a natural good, a cumu
lative life, and an ideal purpose. Art, science,
government, human nature itself, are self-defin
ing and self-preserving: by partly fixing a struct
ure they fix an ideal. But the barbarian can
hardly regard such things, for to have distin
guished and fostered them would be to have
founded a civilisation.

CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL 263

Darwin on Reason s function in denning the

lse< ideal is in principle extremely simple,
although all time and all existence would have to
be gathered in before the applications of that
principle could be exhausted. A better example
of its essential working could hardly be found
than one which Darwin gives to illustrate the
natural origin of moral sense. A swallow, im
pelled by migratory instincts to leave a nest full
of unfledged young, would endure a moral conflict.
The more lasting impulse, memory being assumed,
would prompt a moral judgment when it emerged
again after being momentarily obscured by an in
termittent passion. " While the mother bird is
feeding or brooding over her nestlings, the mater
nal instinct is probably stronger than the migra
tory; but the instinct which is more persistent
gains the victory, and at last, at a moment when
her young ones are not in sight, she takes flight
and deserts them. When arrived at the end of
her long journey, and the migratory instinct ceases
to act, what an agony of remorse each bird would
feel if, from being endowed with great mental
activity, she could not prevent the image continu
ally passing before her mind of her young ones
perishing in the bleak north from cold and
hunger."* She would doubtless upbraid herself,
like any sinner, for a senseless perfidy to her own
dearest good. The perfidy, however, was not
wholly senseless, because the forgotten instinct
* Descent of Man, chapter iii.

264 THE LIFE OF REASON

was not less natural and necessary than the re
membered one, and its satisfaction no less true.
Temptation has the same basis as duty. The dif
ference is one of volume and permanence in the
rival satisfactions, and the attitude conscience will
assume toward these depends more on the repre-
sentability of the demands compared than on their
original vehemence or ultimate results.

A passionate conscience may thus

Conscience /

and reason arise in the play of impulses differing
compared. j n permanence, without involving a
judicial exercise of reason. Nor does such a con
science involve a synthetic ideal, but only the ideal
presence of particular demands. Conflicts in the
conscience are thus quite natural and would con
tinually occur but for the narrowness that com
monly characterises a mind inspired by passion.
A life of sin and repentance is as remote as pos
sible from a Life of Eeason. Yet the same situa
tion which produces conscience and the sense of
duty is an occasion for applying reason to action
and for forming an ideal, so soon as the demands
and satisfactions concerned are synthesised and
balanced imaginatively. The stork might do more
than feel the conflict of his two impulses, he
might do more than embody in alternation the
eloquence of two hostile thoughts. He might pass
judgment upon them impartially and, in the felt
presence of both, conceive what might be a union
or compromise between them.

This resultant object of pursuit, conceived in

CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL 265

reflection and in itself the initial goal of neither
impulse, is the Meal of a mind occupied by the
two : it is the^im Described by reason) under
the circumstances. It differs from the ^prescrip
tion of conscience, in that conscience is often
the spokesman of one interest or of a group of
interests in opposition to other primary impulses
which it would annul altogether; while reason
and the ideal are not active forces nor embodi
ments of passion at all, but merely a method
by which objects of desire are compared in re
flection. The goodness of an end is felt in
wardly by conscience; by reason it can be only
taken upon trust and registered as a fact. For
conscience the object of an opposed will is an evil,
for reason it is a good on the same ground as any
other good, because it is pursued by a natural im
pulse and can bring a real satisfaction. Con
science, in fine, is a party to moral strife, reason
an observer of it who, however, plays the most j
important and beneficent part in the outcome by .
suggesting the terms of peace. This suggested
peace, inspired by sympathy and by knowledge of
the world, is the ideal, which borrows its value
and practical force from the irrational impulses
which it embodies, and borrows its final authority
from the truth with which it recognises them all
and the necessity by which it imposes on each
such sacrifices as are requisite to a general har
mony.

Could each impulse, apart from reason, gain per-

266 THE LIFE OF REASON

feet satisfaction, it would doubtless laugh at jus
tice. The divine, to exercise suasion, must use an
argumentum ad hominem; reason must justify
itself to the heart. But perfect satisfaction is
what an irresponsible impulse can never hope for :
all other impulses, though absent per-

Reason im
poses no new haps from the mind, are none the less

present in nature and have possession
of the field through their physical basis. They
offer effectual resistance to a reckless intruder.
To disregard them is therefore to gain nothing:
reason, far from creating the partial renunciation
and proportionate sacrifices which it imposes,
really minimises them by making them voluntary
and fruitful. The ideal, which may seem to wear
so severe a frown, really fosters all possible pleas
ures; what it retrenches is nothing to what blind
forces and natural catastrophes would otherwise
cut off ; while it sweetens what it sanctions, adding
to spontaneous enjoyments a sense of moral secur
ity and an intellectual light.

Those who are guided only by an irrational
conscience can hardly understand what a good
life would be. Their Utopias have to be super
natural in order that the irresponsible rules
which they call morality may lead by miracle
to happy results. But such a magical and
undeserved happiness, if it were possible, would
be unsavoury: only one phase of human nature
would be satisfied by it, and so impoverished
an ideal cannot really attract the will. For

CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL 267

human nature has been moulded by the same natu
ral forces among which its ideal has to be fulfilled,
and, apart from a certain margin of

Natural goods ., n ,

attainable and Wlld hopes and extravagances, the
compatible in things man s heart desires are attain-

principle. , -. -. , .

able under his natural conditions and
would not be attainable elsewhere. The conflict of
desires and interests in the world is not radical
any more than man s dissatisfaction with his own
nature can be ; for every particular ideal, being an
expression of human nature in operation, must in
the end involve the primary human faculties and
cannot be essentially incompatible with any other
ideal which involves them too.

To adjust all demands to one ideal and adjust I
that ideal to its natural conditions in other I
words, to live the Life of Reason is something *
perfectly possible; for those demands, being akin
to one another in spite of themselves, can be bet
ter furthered by co-operation than by blind con
flict, while the ideal, far from demanding any
profound revolution in nature, merely expresses
her actual tendency and forecasts what her per
fect functioning would be. J

Harmony the Eeason as stich represents or rather/
formal and in- const itutes a single formal interest, the 1

trmsic demand

of reason. interest in harmony. When two in
terests are simultaneous and fall within one act of
apprehension the desirability of harmonising
them is involved in the very effort to realise them
together. If attention and imagination are steady

268 THE LIFE OF REASON

enough to face this implication and not to allow
impulse to oscillate between irreconcilable tenden
cies, reason comes into being. Henceforth things
actual and things desired are confronted by an
ideal which has both pertinence and authority.

CHAPTEE XII

FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE

Respectable A conception of something called
tradition that i mman na ture arises not unnaturally

human nature

is fixed. on observing the passions of men, pas
sions which under various disguises seem to re
appear in all ages and countries. The tendency
of Greek philosophy, with its insistence on gen
eral concepts, was to define this idea of human
nature still further and to encourage the belief
that a single and identical essence, present in all
men, determined their powers and ideal destiny.
Christianity, while it transposed the human ideal
and dwelt on the superhuman affinities of man,
did not abandon the notion of a specific humanity.
On the contrary, such a notion was implied in the
Fall and Redemption, in the Sacraments, and in
the universal validity of Christian doctrine and
precept. For if human nature were not one, there
would be no propriety in requiring all men to
preserve unanimity in faith or conformity in con
duct. Human nature was likewise the entity
which the English psychologists set themselves to
describe; and Kant was so entirely dominated by
the notion of a fixed and universal human nature

369

270 THE LIFE OF KEASON

that its constancy, in his opinion, was the source
of all natural as well as moral laws. Had he
doubted for a moment the stability of human
nature, the foundations of his system would have
fallen out; the forms of perception and thought
would at once have lost their boasted necessity,
since to-morrow might dawn upon new categories
and a modified a priori intuition of space or time ;
and the avenue would also have been closed by
which man was led, through his unalterable moral
sentiments, to assumptions about metaphysical
truths.

The force of this long tradition has

contrary cur-

rents of opin- been broken, however, by two influences
of great weight in recent times, the
theory of evolution and the revival of pantheism.
The first has reintroduced flux into the conception
Evolution. of existence and the second into the
conception of values. If natural species are fluid
and pass into one another, human nature is merely
a name for a group of qualities found by chance in
certain tribes of animals, a group to which new
qualities are constantly tending to attach them
selves while other faculties become extinct, now in
whole races, now in sporadic individuals. Human
nature is therefore a variable, and its ideal cannot
have a greater constancy than the demands to
which it gives expression. Nor can the ideal of
one man or one age have any authority over
another, since the harmony existing in their nature
and interests is accidental and each is a transi-

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 271

tional phase in an indefinite evolution. The crys
tallisation of moral forces at any moment is con
sequently to be explained by universal, not by
human, laws; the philosopher s interest cannot be
to trace the implications of present and unstable
desires, but rather to discover the mechanical law
by which these desires have been generated and
will be transformed, so that they will change irrev
ocably both their basis and their objects.
Pantheism. To this picture of physical instabil
ity furnished by popular science are to be added
the mystical self-denials involved in pantheism.
These come to reinforce the doctrine that human
nature is a shifting thing with the sentiment that
it is a finite and unworthy one: for every deter
mination of being, it is said, has its significance
as well as its origin in the infinite continuum of
which it is a part. Forms are limitations, and
limitations, according to this philosophy, would
be defects, so that man s only goal would be to
escape humanity and lose himself in the divine
nebula that has produced and must invalidate
each of his thoughts and ideals. As there would
be but one spirit in the world, and that infinite,
so there would be but one ideal and that indiscrim
inate. The despair which the naturalist s view of
human instability might tend to produce is turned
by this mystical initiation into a sort of ecstasy;
and the deluge of conformity suddenly submerges
that Life of Reason which science seemed to con
demn to gradual extinction.

272 THE LIFE OF KEASON

Reason is a human function. Though the
name of reason has been applied to various alleged
principles of cosmic life, vital or dialectical, these
instability principles all lack the essence of
in existences rationality, in that they are not con-
throne their scious movements toward satisfaction,
ideals. no t, in other words, moral and benefi

cent principles at all. Be the instability of
human nature what it may, therefore, the insta
bility of reason is not less, since reason is but a
function of human nature. However relative and
subordinate, in a physical sense, human ideals may
be, these ideals remain the only possible moral
standards for man, the only tests which he can
apply for value or authority in any other quarter.
And among unstable and relative ideals none is
more relative and unstable than that which trans
ports all value to a universal law, itself indiffer
ent to good and evil, and worships it as a deity.
Such an idolatry would indeed be impossible if it
were not partial and veiled, arrived at in follow
ing out some human interest and clung to by force
of moral inertia and the ambiguity of words. In
truth mystics do not practise so entire a renuncia
tion of reason as they preach : eternal validity and
the capacity to deal with absolute reality are still
assumed by them to belong to thought or at least
to feeling. Only they overlook in their descrip
tion of human nature just that faculty which they
exercise in their speculation ; their map leaves out
the ground on which they stand. The rest, which

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 273

they are not identified with for the moment, they
proceed to regard de haut en bos and to discredit
as a momentary manifestation of universal laws,
physical or divine. They forget that this faith
in law, this absorption in the blank reality, this
enthusiasm for the ultimate thought, are mere
human passions like the rest; that they endure
them as they might a fever and that the animal
instincts are patent on which those spiritual yearn
ings repose.

Absolutist This last fact would be nothing

humankind a g a i ns t tne feelings in question, if they
halting. were not made vehicles for absolute

revelations. On the contrary, such a relativity in
instincts is the source of their importance. In
virtue of this relativity they have some basis and
function in the world; for did they not repose on
human nature they could never express or trans
form it. Religion and philosophy are not always
beneficent or important, but when they are it is
precisely because they help to develop human
faculty and to enrich human life. To imagine
that by means of them we can escape from human
nature and survey it from without is an ostrich-
like illusion obvious to all but to the victim of it.
Such a pretension may cause admiration in the
schools, where self-hypnotisation is easy, but in
the world it makes its professors ridiculous. For
in their eagerness to empty their mind of human
prejudices they reduce its rational burden to u
minimum, and if they still continue to dogmatise,
VOL. 118

274 THE LIFE OF EEASON

it is sport for the satirist to observe what forgotten
accident of language or training has survived the
crash of the universe and made the one demon
strable path to Absolute Truth.
AII science a Neither the path of abstraction fol-

mome nteS * 10Wed ^ the m J sticS > n r that f direct

thought. and, as it avers, unbiassed observation
followed by the naturalists, can lead beyond that
region of common experience, traditional feeling,
and conventional thought which all minds enter
at birth and can elude only at the risk of inward
collapse and extinction. The fact that observation
involves the senses, and the senses their organs,
is one which a naturalist can hardly overlook ; and
when we add that logical habits, sanctioned by
utility, are needed to interpret the data of sense,
the humanity of science and all its constructions
becomes clearer than day. Superstition itself
could not be more human. The path of unbiassed
observation is not a path away from conventional
life; it is a progress in conventions. It improves
human belief by increasing the proportion of two
of its ingredients, attentive perception and prac
tical calculus. The whole resulting vision, as it
is sustained from moment to moment by present
experience and instinct, has no value apart from
actual ideals. And if it proves human nature to
be unstable, it can build that proof on nothing
more stable than human faculty as at the moment
it happens to be.

Nor is abstraction a less human process, as if

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 275

by becoming very abstruse indeed we could hope
to become divine. Is it not a commonplace of the
AII criticism schools that to form abstract ideas is
likewise. the prerogative of man s reason ? Is not
abstraction a method by which mortal intelligence
makes haste? Is it not the makeshift of a mind
overloaded with its experience, the trick of an eye
that cannot master a profuse and ever-changing
world ? Shall these diagrams drawn in fancy, this
system of signals in thought, be the Absolute
Truth dwelling within us? Do we attain reality
by making a silhouette of our dreams? If the
scientific world be a product of human faculties,
the metaphysical world must be doubly so ; for the
material there given to human understanding is
here worked over again by human art. This con
stitutes the dignity and value of dialectic, that in
spite of appearances it is so human; it bears to
experience a relation similar to that which the arts
bear to the same, where sensible images, selected
by the artist s genius and already coloured by his
aesthetic bias, are redyed in the process of repro
duction whenever he has a great style, and sat
urated anew with his mind.

There can be no question, then, of eluding
human nature or of conceiving it and its environ
ment in such a way as to stop its operation. We
may take up our position in one region of experi
ence or in another, we may, in unconsciousness
of the interests and assumptions that support us,
criticise the truth or value of results obtained else-

276 THE LIFE OF REASON

where. Our criticism will be solid in proportion
to the solidity of the unnamed convictions that
inspire it, that is, in proportion to the deep roots
and fruitful ramifications which those convictions
may have in human life. Ultimate truth and
ultimate value will be reasonably attributed to
those ideas and possessions which can give human
nature, as it is, the highest satisfaction. We may
admit that human nature is variable; but that
admission, if justified, will be justified by the sat
isfaction which it gives human nature to make it.
We might even admit that human ideals are vain
but only if they were nothing worth for the attain
ment of the veritable human ideal.
Origins in- The given constitution of reason,
essential. with whatever a dialectical philosophy
might elicit from it, obviously determines nothing
about the causes that may have brought reason to
its present pass or the phases that may have pre
ceded its appearance. Certain notions about
physics might no doubt suggest themselves to the
moralist, who never can be the whole man; he
might suspect, for instance, that the transitive
intent of intellect and will pointed to their vital
basis. Transcendence in operation might seem
appropriate only to a being with a history and
with an organism subject to external influences,
whose mind should thus come to represent not
merely its momentary state but also its constitu
tive past and its eventual fortunes. Such sugges
tions, however, would be extraneous to dialectical

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 277

self-knowledge. They would be tentative only,
and human nature would be freely admitted to be
as variable, as relative, and as transitory as the
natural history of the universe might make it.
Ideals The error, however, would be pro-

functional, found and the contradiction hopeless
if we should deny the ideal authority of human
nature because we had discovered its origin and
conditions. Nature and evolution, let us say,
have brought life to the present form; but this
life lives, these organs have determinate functions,
and human nature, here and now, in relation to
the ideal energies it unfolds, is a fundamental
essence, a collection of activities with determinate
limits, relations, and ideals. The integration and
determinateness of these faculties is the condition
for any synthetic operation of reason. As the
structure of the steam-engine has varied greatly
since its first invention, and its attributions have
increased, so the structure of human nature has
undoubtedly varied since man first appeared upon
the earth; but as in each steam-engine at each
moment there must be a limit of mobility, a unity
of function and a clear determination of parts and
tensions, so in human nature, as found at any time
in any man, there is a definite scope by virtue of
which alone he can have a reliable memory, a
recognisable character, a faculty of connected
thought and speech, a social utility, and a moral
ideal. On man s given structure, on his activity
hovering about fixed objects, depends the possibil-

278 THE LIFE OF EEASON

ity of conceiving or testing any truth or making

any progress in happiness.

,. Thinkers of different experience and

Iney are trans- . *

ferabie to sim- organisation have pro tanto different
liar beings. logicg and Different moral laws. There
are limits to communication even among beings of
the same race, and the faculties and ideals of one
intelligence are not transferable without change to
any other. If this historic diversity in minds
were complete, so that each lived in its own moral
world, a science of each of these moral worlds
would still be possible provided some inner fixity
or constancy existed in its meanings. In every
human thought together with an immortal intent
there is a mortal and irrecoverable perception:
something in it perishes instantly, the part that
can be materially preserved being proportionate
to the stability or fertility of the organ that pro
duced it. If the function is imitable, the object
it terminates in will reappear, and two or more
moments, having the same ideal, will utter com
parable messages and may perhaps be unanimous.
Unanimity in thought involves identity of func
tions and similarity in organs. These conditions
mark off the sphere of rational communication and
society; where they fail altogether there is no
mutual intelligence, no conversation, no moral
solidarity.

The inner authority of reason, however, is no
more destroyed because it has limits in physical
expression or because irrational things exist, than

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 279

the grammar of a given language is invalidated
Authority because other languages do not share
internal. j^ O r because some people break its
rules and others are dumb altogether. Innumer
able madmen make no difference to the laws of
thought, which borrow their authority from the
inward intent and cogency of each rational mind.
Reason, like beauty, is its own excuse for being.
It is useful, indeed, for living well, when to give
reason satisfaction is made the measure of good.
The true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by
profession, must be prepared to tread the wine
press alone. He may indeed flourish like the bay-
tree in a grateful environment, but more often he
will rather resemble a reed shaken by the wind.
Whether starved or fed by the accidents of fortune
he must find his essential life in his own ideal.
In spiritual life, heteronomy is suicide. That
universal soul sometimes spoken of, which is to
harmonise and correct individual demands, if it
were a will and an intelligence in act, would itself
be an individual like the others; while if it pos
sessed no will and no intelligence, such as individ
uals may have, it would be a physical force or
law, a dynamic system without moral authority
and with a merely potential or represented exist
ence. For to be actual and self-existent is to be
individual. The living mind cannot surrender its
rights to any physical power or subordinate itself
to any figment of its own art without falling into
manifest idolatry.

280 THE LIFE OF REASON

Human nature, in the sense in which it is the
transcendental foundation of all science and
morals, is a functional unity in each man ; it is no
Reason auton- general or abstract essence, the average
omous. O f all men s characters, nor even the

complex of the qualities common to all men. It
is the entelechy of the living individual, be he
typical or singular. That his type should be odd
or common is merely a physical accident. If he
can know himself by expressing the entelechy of
his own nature in the form of a consistent ideal,
he is a rational creature after his own kind, even
if, like the angels of Saint Thomas, he be the only
individual of his species. What the majority of
human animals may tend to, or what the past or
future variations of a race may be, has nothing to
do with determining the ideal of human nature in
a living man, or in an ideal society of men bound
together by spiritual kinship. Otherwise Plato
could not have reasoned well about the republic
without adjusting himself to the politics of
Buddha or Eousseau, and we should not be able to
determine our own morality without making con
cessions to the cannibals or giving a vote to the
ants. Within the field of an anthropology that
tests humanity by the skull s shape, there might
be room for any number of independent morali
ties, and although, as we shall see, there is actually
a similar foundation in all human and even in all
animal natures, which supports a rudimentary
morality common to all, yet a perfect morality is

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 281

not really common to any two men nor to any two
phases of the same man s life,
its distribution. The distribution of reason, though a
subject irrelevant to pure logic or morals, is one
naturally interesting to a rational man, for he is
concerned to know how far beings exist with a
congenial structure and an ideal akin to his own.
That circumstance will largely influence his hap
piness if, being a man, he is a gregarious and sym
pathetic animal. His moral idealism itself will
crave support from others, if not to give it direc
tion, at least to give it warmth and courage. The
best part of wealth is to have worthy heirs, and
mind can be transmitted only to a kindred mind.
Hostile natures cannot be brought together by
mutual invective nor harmonised by the brute de
struction and disappearance of either party. But
when one or both parties have actually disap
peared, and the combat has ceased for lack of com
batants, natures not hostile to one another can fill
the vacant place. In proportion to their inbred
unanimity these will cultivate a similar ideal and
rejoice together in its embodiment.

This has happened to some extent in the whole
world, on account of natural conditions which
limit the forms of life possible in one region; for
nature is intolerant in her laxity and punishes too
Natural seiec- S Teai originality and heresy with
tion of minds, death. Such moral integration has
occurred very markedly in every good race and
society whose members, by adapting themselves to

282 THE LIFE OF EEASON

the same external forces, have created and discov
ered their common soul. Spiritual unity is a
natural product. There are those who see a great
mystery in the presence of eternal values and im
personal ideals in a moving and animal world, and
think to solve that dualism, as they call it, by
denying that nature can have spiritual functions
or spirit a natural cause; but nothing can be
simpler if we make, as we should, existence the
test of possibility. A b esse ad posse valet illatio.
Nature is a perfect garden of ideals, and passion
is the perpetual and fertile soil for poetry, myth,
and speculation. Nor is this origin merely im
puted to ideals by a late and cynical observer : it
is manifest in the ideals themselves, by their sub
ject matter and intent. For what are ideals
about, what do they idealise, except natural exist
ence and natural passions ? That would be a mis
erable and superfluous ideal indeed that was
nobody s ideal of nothing. The pertinence of
ideals binds them to nature, and it is only the worst
and flimsiest ideals, the ideals of a sick soul, that
elude nature s limits and belie her potentialities.
Ideals are forerunners or heralds of nature s suc
cesses, not always followed, indeed, by their ful
filment, for nature is but nature and has to feel
her way; but they are an earnest, at least, of an
achieved organisation, an incipient accomplish
ment, that tends to maintain and root itself in the
world.

To speak of nature s successes is, of course, to

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 283

impute success retroactively ;. but the expression
may be allowed when we consider that the same
functional equilibrium which is looked back upon
as a good by the soul it serves, first creates in
dividual being and with it creates the possibility
of preference and the whole moral world; and it
is more than a metaphor to call that achievement
a success which has made a sense of success pos
sible and actual. That nature cannot intend or
previously esteem those formations which are the
condition of value or intention existing at all, is
a truth too obvious to demand repetition; but
when those formations arise they determine esti
mation,, and fix the direction of preference, so that
the evolution which produced them, when looked
back upon from the vantage-ground thus gained,
cannot help seeming to have been directed toward
the good now distinguished and partly attained.
For this reason creation is regarded as a work of
love, and the power that brought order out of
chaos is called intelligence.

Living, These natural formations, tending

stability. to generate and realise each its ideal,
Tire, as it were, eddies in the universal flux, pro
duced no less mechanically, doubtless, than the
onward current, yet seeming to arrest or to reverse
it. Inheritance arrests the flux by repeating a
series of phases with a recognisable rhythm;
memory reverses it by modifying this rhythm itself
by the integration of earlier phases into those that
supervene. Inheritance and memory make human

284 THE LIFE OF EEASON

stability. This stability is relative, being still a
mode of flux, and consists fundamentally in repe
tition. Eepetition marks some progress on mere
continuity, since it preserves form and disregards
time and matter. Inheritance is repetition on a
larger scale, not excluding spontaneous variations ;
while habit and memory are a sort of heredity
within the individual, since here an old percep
tion reappears, by way of atavism, in the midst of
a forward march. Life is thus enriched and re
action adapted to a wider field; much as a note is
enriched by its overtones, and by the tensions, in
herited from the preceding notes, which give it a
new setting.

Progress, far from consisting in

Continuity

necessary to change, depends on retentiveness.
progress. When change is absolute there re
mains no being to improve and no direction
is set for possible improvement: and when ex
perience is not retained, as among savages,
infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remem
ber the past are condemned to repeat it. In
the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and
easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in
consecutiveness and persistence. This is the con
dition of children and barbarians, in whom in
stinct has learned nothing from experience. In a
second stage men are docile to events, plastic to
new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them
on original instincts, which they thus bring to
fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 285

and true progress. Last comes a stage when re-
tentivene^s is exhausted and all that happens is
at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical,
repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity
and fertile readaptation. In a moving world re-
adaptation is the price of longevity. The hard
shell, far from protecting the vital principle, con
demns it to die down slowly and be gradually
chilled ; immortality in such a case must have been
secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation
plastic to the contemporary world and able to re
tain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as
youth, and more incorrigible ; it displays the same
inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes
self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive
reaction, like a bird s chirp.

Limits of Not all readaptation, however, is

Tlti^T progress, for ideal identity must not
heritage. be lost. The Latin language did not
progress when it passed into Italian. It died.
Its amiable heirs may console us for its depart
ure, but do not remove the fact that their parent
is extinct. So every individual, nation, and re
ligion has its limit of adaptation; so long as the
increment it receives is digestible, so long as the
organisation already attained is extended and elab
orated without being surrendered, growth goes on ;
but when the foundation itself shifts, when what
is gained at the periphery is lost at the centre, the f
flux appears again and progress is not real. Thus
a succession of generations or languages or relig-

286 THE LIFE OF KEASON

ions constitutes no progress unless some ideal pres
ent at the beginning is transmitted to the end and
reaches a better expression there ; without this sta
bility at the core no common standard exists and
all comparison of value with value must be exter
nal and arbitrary. Ketentiveness, we must repeat,
is the condition of progress.

The variation human nature is open to is not,
then, variation in any direction. There are trans
formations that would destroy it. So long as it
endures it must retain all that constitutes it now,
. all that it has so far gathered and worked into its
substance. The genealogy of progress is like that
of man, who can never repudiate a single ancestor.
It starts, so to speak, from a single point, free as
yet to take any direction. When once, however,
evolution has taken a single step, say in the direc
tion of vertebrates, that step cannot be retraced
without extinction of the species. Such extinc
tion may take place while progress in other lines
is continued. All that preceded the forking of
the dead and the living branch will be as well rep
resented and as legitimately continued by the sur
viving radiates as it could have been by the ver
tebrates that are no more; but the vertebrate
ideal is lost for ever, and no more progress is pos
sible along that line.

Perfectibility. The future of moral evolution is
accordingly infinite, but its character is more and
more determinate at every step. Mankind can
never, without perishing, surrender its animal

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 287

nature, its need to eat and drink, its sexual method
of reproduction, its vision of nature, its faculty of
speech, its arts of music, poetry, and building.
Particular races cannot subsist if they renounce
their savage instincts, but die, like wild animals,
in captivity; and particular individuals die when
not suffered any longer to retain their memories,
their bodies, or even their master passions. Thus
human nature survives amid a continual fluctua
tion of its embodiments. At every step twigs and
leaves are thrown out that last but one season ; but
the underlying stem may have meantime grown
stronger and more luxuriant. Whole branches
sometimes wither, but others may continue to
bloom. Spiritual unity runs, like sap, from the
common root to every uttermost flower; but at
each forking in the growth the branches part com
pany, and what happens in one is no direct con
cern of the others. The products of one age and
nation may well be unintelligible to another; the
elements of humanity common to both may lie
lower down. So that the highest things are com
municable to the fewest persons, and yet, among
these few, are the most perfectly communicable.
The more elaborate and determinate a man s heri
tage and genius are, the more he has in common
with his next of kin, and the more he can transmit
and implant in his posterity for ever. Civilisation
is cumulative. The farther it goes the intenser it
is, substituting articulate interests for animal
fumes and for enigmatic passions. Such articu-

288 THE LIFE OF KEASON

late interests can be shared ; and the infinite vistas
they open up can be pursued for ever with the
knowledge that a work long ago begun is being
perfected and that an ideal is being embodied
which need never be outworn.

So long as external conditions re-
Nature and main cons t an t it is obvious that the

human nature.

greater organisation a being possesses
the greater strength he will have. If indeed pri
mary conditions varied, the finer creatures would
die first; for their adaptation is more exquisite
and the irreversible core of their being much
larger relatively; but in a constant environment
their equipment makes them irresistible and
secures their permanence and multiplication. Now
man is a part of nature and her organisation may
be regarded as the foundation of his own : the word
nature is therefore less equivocal than it seems, for
every nature is Nature herself in one of her more
specific and better articulated forms. Man there
fore represents the universe that sustains him; his
existence is a proof that the cosmic equilibrium
that fostered his life is a natural equilibrium,
capable of being long maintained. Some of the
ancients thought it eternal; physics now suggests
a different opinion. But even if this equilibrium,
by which the stars are kept in their, courses and
human progress is allowed to proceed, is funda
mentally unstable, it shows what relative stability
nature may attain. Could this balance be pre
served indefinitely, no one knows what wonderful

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 289

adaptations might occur within it, and to what ex
cellence human nature in particular might arrive.-
Nor is it unlikely that before the cataclysm comes
time will be afforded for more improvement than
moral philosophy has ever dreamed of. For it is
remarkable how inane and unimaginative Utopias
have generally been. This possibility is not un
inspiring and may help to console those who think
the natural conditions of life are not conditions
that a good life can be lived in. The possibility
of essential progress is bound up with the tragic
possibility that progress and human life should
some day end together. If the present equilibrium
of forces were eternal all adaptations to it would
have already taken place and, while no essential
catastrophe would need to be dreaded, no essential
improvement could be hoped for in all eternity.
I am not sure that a humanity such as we know,
were it destined to exist for ever, would offer a
more exhilarating prospect than a humanity hav
ing indefinite elasticity together with a precarious
tenure of life. Mortality has its compensations:
one is that all evils are transitory, another that
better times may come.

Human nature, then, has for its core

Human nature t ^ g^gtance of nature at large, and

formulated.

is one of its more complex lormations.
Its determination is progressive. It varies indefi
nitely in its historic manifestations and fades into
what, as a matter of natural history, might no
longer be termed human. At each moment it has
VOL. I. 19

290 THE LIFE OF KEASON

its fixed and determinate entelechy, the ideal of
that being s life, based on his instincts, summed
up in his character, brought to a focus in his re
flection, and shared by all who have attained or
may inherit his organisation. His perceptive and
reasoning faculties are parts of human nature, as
embodied in him; all objects of belief or desire,
with all standards of justice and duty which he
can possibly acknowledge, are transcripts of it,
conditioned by it, and justifiable only as expres
sions of its inherent tendencies.

This definition of human nature, clear as it may
be in itself and true to the facts, will perhaps
hardly make sufficiently plain how the Life of
Reason, having a natural basis, has in the ideal
world a creative and absolute authority. A more
its concrete concrete description of human nature
description ma accor( Ji n prly not come amiss, espe-

reserved for . J

\hs sequel. cially as the important practical ques
tion touching the extension of a given moral
authority over times and places depends on the
degree of kinship found among the creatures in
habiting those regions. To give a general picture
of human nature and its rational functions will
be the task of the following books. The truth of
a description which must be largely historical may
not be indifferent to the reader, and I shall study
to avoid bias in the presentation, in so far as
is compatible with frankness and brevity; yet
even if some bias should manifest itself and if the
picture were historically false, the rational prin-

FLUX AND CONSTANCY 291

ciples we shall be trying to illustrate will not
thereby be invalidated. Illustrations might have
been sought in some fictitious world, if imagina
tion had not seemed so much less interesting than
reality,, which besides enforces with unapproach
able eloquence the main principle in view, namely,
that nature carries its ideal with it and that the
progressive organisation of irrational impulses
makes a rational life.

B

945

S23L7

1906

v.1

Santayana, George
The life of reason

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